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GERMANY MISJUDGED

AN APPEAL TO INTERNATIONAL GOOD

WILL IN THE INTEREST OF A

LASTING PEACE

ROLAND HUGINS

CHICAGO LONDON

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.
1916

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.

1916

Printed in the United States of America

TO THOSE AMERICANS AND ENGLISHMEN
WHO HAVE HEEDED KIPLING WHERE
KIPLING HAS NOT HEEDED HIMSELF:

"IF YOU CAN KEEP YOUR HEAD WHEN ALL ABOUT YOU
ARE LOSING THEIRS AND BLAMING IT ON YOU—"

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED.

FOREWORD

THERE are persons who look upon the term
"pro-German" as an epithet of reproach. Though
not one of these, I insist that the term does not
accurately characterize this book. The book is pro-
American. It is written from the American point of
view, and with American interests in mind. Person-
ally I am not much w^orried for the Germans, because,
for one thing, I am convinced that they are entirely
able to take care of themselves. But I am much con-
cerned for the future of America.

I have tried to analyze the international situation
from the facts as I see them. I have written with
both a fear and a hope : a fear that the United States,
the one great nation that so far has stood aloof, might
lose its head and join the carnage; a hope that Amer-
ica, at some future time, might contribute effectively
to the upbuilding of a permanent peace for the world.
To my mind the United States can make no bigger
blunder, no graver historical mistake, than to abandon
its position of neutrality. I contend that it has no
business in this war, no matter whether the Teutonic
Powers win or lose. The plunge into war is like a
jump into a whirlpool ; it is easy enough to get in, but
there is no calm second thought, and escape can be

FOREWORD

purchased only by a terrific drain on vitality. Amer-
ica sober, would not make war; but America drunk
with anti-German prejudice, might take the plunge.
To add, in some small way, to that sobriety of judg-
ment that would make us pause before we leap, is one
of the chief purposes of the book.

That America will be able to do anything construc-
tive for world peace seems to me questionable. For
at present the vision of America is clouded. It is not
anti-war, except in a vague, sentimental way; it is
anti-German. It identifies "militarism" with a single
nation. It does not see that militarism in Germany
(and I do not deny its existence there) can never be
wiped out by the pressure of rival militarisms. Guilt,
apparently, is never satisfactory until it is personal.
Americans in general have felt revulsion and horror
at this war, and they have shown a disposition to fix
the guilt on somebody, some definite set of human
beings, — not a system — not an historical process — but
a visible and punishable criminal. And they have made
the German people, or the German Junkers, the crim-
inal. But this is not thinking, it is malice. G. Lowes
Dickinson has observed: "I believe that this war
... is a calamity to civilization unequaled, unexam-
pled, perhaps irremediable; and that the only good
that can come out of it would be a clearer compre-
hension by ordinary men and women of how wars
are brought about, and a determination on their part
to put a stop to them." America will never contribute
effectively to the cause of world peace until it sets

FOREWORD

about to examine critically the underlying causes of
modern war. Such an examination can be made only
when the purposes and needs of each nation, including
Germany, are approached in a friendly spirit.

I belong, I think, to that class of Americans whose
voice so far has been little heard. For I am one of
those whose sympathy with Germany rests on rational
rather than on emotional grounds. This is a pre-
sumptuous claim, perhaps, but one I can make fairly.
I have no German blood — and incidentally, no Irish.
I have never been in Germany, and I have no ties
with the Fatherland. I am an American who has been
here, so to speak, for a long time, — since about 1690.
As I view them, these considerations are not impor-
tant. We are all Americans together, each equally
entitled to his opinion. But there are so many haughty
patriots haranguing the country who seek to monop-
olize "truly American" spokesmanship, that I must
declare my right to speak as an American, unhyphen-
ated.

The four main chapters of the book are reprinted
from The Open Court for November and December,
1915, and for January and April, 1916. The intro-
ductory chapter, "The Myth of a Demon Enemy," is
reprinted from the New York Times of July 11, 1915,
and is reproduced here because it expresses in suc-
cinct form the spirit in which the whole is conceived.
Three of the chief chapters are put in the form of
open letters to Germany, England and France, the
three great nations involved that may be said to be

FOREWORD

representative of Western civilization. The final chap-
ter treats directly of America. In reality, however,
the entire book is written to and for Americans, — and
quite as much for those whose sympathies are pro-
Ally as those whose sympathies are with the Central
Powers. Some portions of the discussion deal with
aspects of opinion and governmental action pertinent
at the time of writing, but the bulk of it treats of the
more fundamental reactions of America to the world
war.

I have tried not to be betrayed by heat of contro-
versy into censorious language. I take it this is not
a time for Americans to indulge in venomous accusa-
tions, however bad tempers may be in Europe. For
after all, half the world is bleeding to death and the
heart of humanity is breaking. When one stops to
think of this war, not in abstractions, but in particu-
lars— what it means in individual human values, he
puts aside rancor, even though (as he thinks) he com-
bats untruth. R. H.

Ithaca, N. Y.

February 1, 1916.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Myth of a Demon Enemy 13

An Explanation to Germany 18

A Question for England 43

France ! 66

The Attitude of America 80

Index 112

THE MYTH OF A DEMON ENEMY

ONE of the peculiarly depressing aspects of modern
war is the degradation of the non-combatant
mind. The civilian population goes blind with intol-
erance and mad with hate. In war we credit any
impossible virtue in ourselves and any degree of wick-
edness in our foe. We swallow with eager gullibility
every tale, plausible or grotesque, of his cruelty, his
bestiality, his mendacity, his stupidity. The enemy
becomes the scapegoat of the universe, and we load
him with every conceivable attribute ofi evil until he
looms in our eyes a monster of inhuman fiendishness.
We picture him as the potential destroyer of every-
thing worthy — of liberty, of art, of democracy, even
of civilization itself. We do our narrow-minded best
to belittle his achievements in science, literature and
government. We are the good white knight, but he
is the seven-headed dragon that God and justice has
called us to destroy.

"War," said an ancient philosopher, "makes men
mild." But this is true only of those who do the
actual fighting. In the trenches, we know, the German
is respected, and even regarded with a half-bantering
affection. The soldier speaks generously of his foe,
whose bravery and suffering he sees and appreciates.

GERMANY MISJUDGED

The soldier, moreover, understands the nature of war-
fare, and does not cite the harshness of mihtary opera-
tions— which he himself, in whatever army, must
practice of necessity — as a proof of the enemy's per-
sonal depravity. The civilian does precisely that. Out
of hearing of the guns the humility and reasonableness
which this game of life and death imposes have no
counterpart. The millions of non-combatants, pricked
daily by poisoned pens, join in an orgy of vilification,
brandish lies about the enemy, chant their hymns of
hate, and curse when they pretend to pray. It is even
probable that a non-militarist democracy runs into this
moral vitiation more easily than a military autocracy.
For where great armies must be raised by volunteer-
ing, abuse of the adversary is elevated to a public duty.
The spirit of the people must be aroused, it is said;
we must be worked up and kept up to the fighting
pitch, or rather to the recruiting pitch, by fair means
or foul. The press takes on an inflammatory and
scurrilous tone. A premium is put upon Billingsgate.
To speak a fair and kindly word for the enemy is
considered traitorous, and to degrade the nation into
a mob is looked upon as a patriotic service.

Of course the better men and women of every
nation will resist this popular delirium. It is one of
the proofs of England's greatness that there has been
a constant stream of protests in her papers and jour-
nals against the slander-mongers. The cheap jour-
nalist and the penny-a-liner mixes his ink with gall,
but the cultivated Englishman speaks with moderation.

THK MVTII OF A DEMON ENEMY

It ought to be possible for a democracy to make war
with dignity. Battles cannot be won by insults, and
mud is not even an effective weapon of defense ; but
it is easy to befoul our own hands and minds. A high
moral tone is a nation's first duty to itself, and it can
be won only by a vigilant self-control. Neither a just
cause nor victory will in itself prevent a spiritual rout.

There are certain obvious and human facts about
Germany that we should keep in mind, both now and
hereafter. Germany is not a Force, a Power, a His-
torical Tendency, or a Beast, but only a number of
Germans, speaking a different language, but funda-
mentally like any other collection of men, women and
children. They are now, and have been in the past,
a great people, who command our respect in peace for
their industrial and intellectual exertions, and in war
for their valor and their power. Furthermore, they
are convinced, like each of the other nations at war,
that they are right in this conflict. In that cause they
pour out their blood like water ; and they are suffering
as few peoples have suffered. Germany, within her
rims of flame, is a nation in bandages and black; by
day her land rings with the clangor of arms and shouts
of defiance, but at night God hears there but one
sound, the sobbing of women. Agony and death mean
the same thing to a Teuton as to any other mortal,
and heartbreak is just as hard to bear.

Deeper and more lasting than any struggles of race,
or pride, or national advantage are the human verities.
Unless we hold to these we shall lose our soul, though

GERMANY MISJUDGED

we win a world. The true note of sane sympathy
and understanding has been struck by an EngHsh
writer not widely known in this country, A. Clutton-
Brock, who contributes to the literary supplement of
the London Times. Permit me to quote one or two
of his admirable paragraphs :

"We know that we are not what the Germans think
us, whatever our sins may be. We know that Eng-
land is not an abstraction, cold and greedy and treach-
erous, but a country of people whose virtues we love
and whose vices we extenuate because they are our
own. But Germany — she seems to us now to speak
with one voice as if she were an abstraction, and that
voice says always the same venomous things against
the abstract England of her evil dream. But she is
not an abstraction any more than England is. She,
too, is a country of men and women who love their
own virtues and extenuate their own faults; and they
also hear of the evil things which England says of
them, and think that England is pouring out a hatred
long nursed and attempting a destruction long planned.
What an ugly word 'Germany' sounds to us now ; yet
to them it is a music which sets them marching, and
they will suffer and die for it, as we for England.
Every man has dignity who is ready to die for a cause,
whether it be good or bad, for men will not die for
causes that do not seem right to them ; and the Ger-
mans, we know, are ready to die in herds and droves,
as we put it, for Germany. And yet each German to
himself remains a single human being, with his indi-

THE MYTH OF A DEMON ENEMY

vidual hopes and fears, witli a wife and children pray-
ing for him at home, with an immortal soul that im-
poses this hard discipline upon his flesh.

"These hosts are not inhuman, whatever evil de-
sign has ranged them against us, but men like ourselves
to whom we also seem inhuman hosts; and if some
voice from heaven could suddenly speak the truth to
us the weapons would drop from our hands and we
would laugh in each other's faces until we wept to
think of all the dead that could not share the truth
with us, and the wounded who could not be cured
by it, and the widows and orphans to whom it could
not give back their husbands and fathers. For the
truth, the ultimate truth, behind all arguments and
national conflicts and all the pride of victory and the
shame of defeat, is that we are men in whom the spirit
is stronger than the flesh, in whom the spirit desires
love more than the flesh desires hatred. We have a
strange way of showing that now ; but whatever our
own delusions, each nation knows that it is fighting
the delusions of the other ; and against them it is neces-
sary for us to fight as against the hallucinated fury of
a madman. Yet the fighting is best done as good
soldiers do it who know that their enemies are men,
not devils, and who fear them the less because they
do not hate."

AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY

THE United States, my German friends, has main-
tained relations of amity and good-will with your
country for a century and more ; and it is to be hoped
that this historic friendship will continue undiminished
through the world war. At the very outbreak of hos-
tilities, however, menacing undercurrents of unpleas-
antness were set in motion, and they have grown stead-
ily in volume and strength. As soon as you became defi-
nitely aware that sentiment here was running against
you, you were amazed ; and that amazement gave way
after a time to irritation. You could not understand,
you said, how this republic should have been misled by
British sophistry. Later you learned that our bankers
were loaning millions to your enemies, and that our
manufacturers were doing a stupendous business in
supplying the Allies with explosives and other muni-
tions of war. Then your irritation changed to bitter-
ness and your papers, with Teutonic candor, did not
attempt to conceal their resentment towards Germany's
"invisible enemy."

There has been a similar growth of antagonistic feel-
ing in America. The bulk of our press took an un-
friendly attitude toward you as early as August 1,
1914. Your invasion of Belgium and the subsequent

AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY

military measures which you employed there greatly
inlensifK'd the hostility of some sections of American
opinion. The current ran against you from that time
on. There were intervals, it is true, when your cause
here aj^peared to be gaining ground, particularly during
the brilliant championship of Dr. Dernburg. But the
sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine caused
anti-German feeling to flame out afresh. The ofticial
relations of the two nations are now strained; and
they may be worse before they are better.

To say that this situation is distressing to many of
us in America is to put the matter mildly. The mutual
misunderstandings will not easily be cleared away.
May I attempt to explain to you why Americans — the
majority, that is — have sided against you? It will be
hard for you to understand the true reasons. The
obvious and usual explanations do not suffice. It was
not because your cable was cut, for news from Berlin
and Vienna reaches us regularly by wireless. It is not
because the German point of view is unknown. We
have had no, censorship in this country, and you no
lack of able defenders. Since the beginning of the
war German-Amricans have protested vehemently
against the prevailing antagonism, and our magazines
and newspapers have published many telling argu-
ments from pro-German pens. It is not because Amer-
icans dislike Germany and things German. Before
the war there may have been prejudice in some quar-
ters against Germany ; but there was also prejudice
against England and against Russia. If German

GERMANY MISJUDGED

achievements in art, science and government are now
belittled, it is because a recent partisanship has chilled
the admiration rightly due you as a great people.

No, the blindness and intolerance now so conspicu-
ous are not the causes of our bias, but rather its symp-
toms. You will entirely fail to understand the attitude
of the typical American of intelligence unless you see
that he thinks himself fair and just. He admits to
no prejudice; he scoffs at the idea that he is the
victim of English lies or sophistry ; he believes he has
arrived at a reasoned judgment after an impartial ex-
amination of the evidence. I think the American
errs, but I know that he errs in good faith. He has
rendered a decision against you because in his mind
certain large charges have been proved against you.
These charges may be grouped under the four follow-
ing heads :

First, that you, the people of Germany, or your
military caste, started this war, and made Europe a
shambles in an attempt to dominate world politics.

Second, that your invasion and devastation of
Belgium was a legal and moral crime which nothing
can excuse or to appreciable degree palliate.

Third, that you make war with ruthlessness and
brutality, and disregard in the pursuit of your military
ends the rules of international law and the dictates
of humanity.

Fourth, that your victory would be detrimental to
civilization, leading to a militaristic domination which
would ultimately threaten the peace of all democratic
countries, including the United States.

AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY

These accusations undoubtedly seem to you exag-
gerated, absurd, grossly unjust. So they are, consid-
ered from any viewpoint which includes knowledge
of and sympathy for the German people. But let me'
assure you that they are held in all seriousness by
thousands and thousands of Americans who are quite
above the charge of either stupidity or hypocrisy.
Their attitude results from a peculiar logic and their
previous point of view.

Americans, you should understand, were surprised
at this war. Yourselves, like Russians, Frenchmen,
Englishmen, who have been living for two decades
under the shadow of a possible European conflict, saw
in the outbreak of hostilities the clash of deep his-
torical forces. But Americans were literally bowled
over with astonishment. They had been listening to
the soothing assurances of pacifists, and the insincere
professions of statesmen, until they were hypnotized
into believing that a world war was "impossible." And
when the war did come they hit upon the most obvious
explanation : that some nation had conspired in its own
interest to upset the sacred status quo. America im-
mediately set herself up as judge to determine who
was "guilty," and straightway fixed the blame on you.

Germany was selected as the culprit because the
surface case was against you. You had backed up
Austria-Hungary in an attack on the small nation
Scrvia. You had sent out twenty-four-hour ultima-

GERMANY MISJUDGED

tums and made the formal declarations of war on both
Russia and France. You had drawn in England by
violating the neutrality of a little country England
had pledged to support. And so the surface case was
complete ; and this is precisely the case which your
enemies rigged up against you in their White, Orange,
Yellow, Gray and Blue Books. America accepted the
indictment at almost face value.

Does it seem preposterous that so simple, so naive a
view of European politics could seriously be enter-
tained? Does it appear ridiculous to you that the
significance of events should be judged by their se-
quence in time rather than by their causal connections,
or that the incidents of a brief crisis should be given
more weight than all the antecedent issues out of
which the crisis arose? Well, such is the mind of
average America. You must remember that we stand
outside of the whirl of world politics, and are not
accustomed to penetrate the shams of cabinets and the
intrigues of diplomats. In particular the editors who
control our newspapers and magazines, and who to
some extent do "mold" public opinion, are usually
without a sound European perspective, and often dis-
play, in their quick but cocksure judgments of affairs
outside our borders, a schoolboy naivete and a pro-
vincial gullibility. They think of states as persons,
who act on single and sentimental motives.

But that is not all. America is not entirely made up
of half-educated journalists and people who follow
their opinions. Men of culture and travel, who take

AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY

a more sophisticated view of international affairs, have
joined in your condemnation. They, too, hold you
"guilty." And this, I think, traces to one cause: a
failure to understand the true nature and policy of
Russia. The "bear that walks like a man" has been
(luite siiouldered out of sight by England. You as
Germans realize that the controversy which led directly
up to the war was a Russo-German quarrel.^ You
comprehend the politics of the Balkans, where bribery,
assassination, and savage "exterminations" serve in
lieu of diplomacy. You know that it was Russia's
unyielding mobilization on two frontiers which pre-
cipitated the present struggle. But Americans do not
sense these things. From the beginning of the war
Russia has been systematically and shamelessly white-
washed. We are being fed with talk about Russia's
liberalization at the very time when the Russian gov-
ernment is throwing labor leaders into prison, exiling
her Liberals to Siberia, instituting new pogroms against
the Jews, and proceeding with a relentless Russifica-
tion of Finland. We are constantly invited to admire
"the .soul of the Slav" as exemplified in Tolstoy,
Dostoyevsky and Turgenieff, as though the intellectuals
of Russia were not a small class among one hundred
and seventy millions which sufiFers a living martyrdom
in revolt against the dominant and inhuman autocracy.
W'hat G. Lowes Dickinson recently said to English-
men might be addressed with even more force to
Americans: "Since there has been in Russia a class

'Brailsford, II. N., The Origins of the Great War.

GERMANY MISJUDGED

of thinkers and of writers that class has given all its
energy to destroy the power and discredit the ideas
of the Russian government. Persecuted with a horror
of persecution of which Englishmen can form but the
palest image (for such experiences lie outside our
ken), exiled, imprisoned, tortured, by hundreds and
by thousands, they have never ceased to protest, in
season and out of season, against the whole conception
of the state which animates the soulless bureaucracy
of Russia."

And so the American, forgetting Russia, and with
his eyes on Germany, France, Belgium and England,
declares you the aggressor. May I presume to give
you my personal view of the burden of responsibility?
In one sense, the ultimate sense, I cannot exempt you
from all blame. Your government has, like all the
governments of Europe, been concerning itself with
the balance of power, and with imperialistic projects.
It has demanded a voice in world affairs, its place in
the sun. The creation of a great army, and especially
the building of a big navy, were not wholly uncon-
nected with these ambitions. In this you were merely
part of the European system, for the world today is
a militarist world. You were no deeper in it than
England, which spent far more money on its military
and naval equipment, nor France, which had a greater
proportion of its population under arms. If you were
better prepared it was only on account of certain quali-
ties in your character, of thoroughness, of punctuality,
of scientific versatility, of genius for organization,

AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY

which are just as conspicuous in the arts of peace as
of war. Each of the chancellories of Europe plotted
for selfish national advantages — advantages which had
very little real significance for the masses in any coun-
try— and bent its chief efforts to forming alliances
which would shift the balance of power in its favor.
To that system of rival alliances must be ascribed this
collapse of civilization ; for fundamentally the conflict
on its negative side is a war of mutual fears, and on
its positive side a war of imperial ambitions. Thereby
the system stands forever condemned, as must any
system whch causes the slaughter of hundreds of thou-
sands, and brings heartbreak to a million homes. The
war itself is the great tragedy. The wreck of any na-
tional ambitions is a paltry calamity by the side of it,
and the fulfillment of no national hopes can compen-
sate for it.

But once granting the fundamental truth that the
world of today is a militaristic world, the part you
Germans have played in it has been a notably inof-
fensive and honorable one. You have kept the peace
for forty years, while every other great nation went
to war. You have seen England and France each add,
by military aggression or threat of it, four million
square miles of colonial territory to their possessions,
while you added one million, — mostly worthless land.
You saw your legitimate projects for expansion balked
again and again by English and French diplomacy, in
Africa, in Asia, in the Balkans. You watched the
growing menace of Russia, as, financed by French and

GERMANY MISJUDGED

British gold, she increased her military resources, built
strategic railroads, and marshalled her half-barbarous
millions. And when Russia threw down the challenge
you accepted it. You were fighting for yourselves a
preventative war, and for your ally Austria-Hungary
a defensive war.

Your statesmen were entirely honest when they said
in the German White Paper ;

"Had the Servians been allowed, with the help of
Russia and France, to endanger the integrity of the
neighboring monarchy much longer, the consequence
must have been the gradual disruption of Austria, and
the subjection of the whole Slav world to the Russian
scepter, with the result that the position of the German
race in central Europe would have become untenable."

You knew that the Pan-Slav movement, engineered
from St. Petersburg, menaced Austria directly and
yourself indirectly. What nonsense then to say that
Russia entered the war out of sympathy for her little
Slav brothers, the Serbs ! Russia had recently watched
the humiliation of her little Slav brothers, the Bulgars,
with composure, and even with satisfaction. For Bul-
garia had broken loose from Russian influence, but the
Servians were Russian tools. Further — and here is a
point ignored in most of the "histories" written by
Englishmen and Americans — Austria under pressure
from your government modified her demands on Servia
before she mobilized on August 1. She conceded the
only point on which Russia, even from an imperialistic
standpoint, could be interested, the territorial integrity

AN EXPLAXATIOX TO GERMANY

and sovereignty of Servia. Ikit Russia, certain of the
co-operation of France, and confident of the support
of Great Britain, moved from first to last for war.
She was the first of the powers to mobihze. She per-
sisted in tliat mobilization despite your warning that
it could be interpreted in only one way. It was then
that you saw parley was futile; you sent your ulti-
matums, and mobilized to meet the double menace.

There are Americans who, by some freak of rea-
soning, declare that France was "attacked" by you —
France, who had lent herself body and soul to the
designs of the Russian autocracy! France, whose an-
swer to your inquiry about her position was to call
up her reserves ! No nation, however confident of its
strength, would prefer to fight Russia and France
together rather than Russia alone. You know who
made the "attack."

Ill

The invasion of Belgium is considered in this coun-
try the strongest count in the indictment against you ;
nothing carries such conviction of German perfidy to
tile mind of the American as your treatment of a
pledge to respect her neutrality as a "scrap of paper ;"
and many go about declaring that America disgraced
herself among the nations by not officially protesting
against this act of unrighteousness. For myself, this
hue and cry over Belgium seems one of the least sensi-
ble aspects of American discussion. I cannot but ad-
mire the bold words of the German Chancellor in the
Reichstag :

GERMANY MISJUDGED

"Gentlemen, we are now in a state of necessity, and
necessity knows no law. Our troops have occupied
Luxemburg and perhaps are already on Belgian soil.
Gentlemen, that is contrary to the dictates of inter-
national law. . . . The wrong — I speak openly — that
we are committing we will endeavor to make good as
soon as our military goal has been reached. Anybody
who is threatened as we are threatened, and is fighting
for his possessions, has only one thought — how he is to
hack his way through."

That statement is one of the few sincere utterances
heard from any European statesman since the war
began. It rings true. You were terribly threatened;
you had to strike through Belgium or court ruin. Any
nation in your predicament would have done the same
thing. G. Bernard Shaw put the matter squarely be-
fore Americans early in the war, when he told them :
"I think, for example, that if Russia made a descent
on your continent under circumstances which made it
essential to the maintenance of your national freedom
that you should move an army through Canada, you
would ask our leave to do so and take it by force if
we did not grant it to you. I may reasonably suspect,
even if all our statesmen raise a shriek of denial, that
we should take a similar liberty under similar circum-
stances in the teeth of all the scraps of paper in our
Foreign Office dustbin."

That is the true British view, not the sniveling cant
over the sanctity of treaties. A recent English his-
torian^ asked, in speaking of the seizure of the Danish

m. W. y. Temperley, Life of Canning, 1905.

AX EXPLANATION TO GERMANY

fleet at Copenhagen in 1807, "Would it have been any
satisfaction, if we had sunk under the pressure from
Bonaparte, to have died with our eyes fixed on Pufifen-
dorf and the law of nations?"

You can see, however, why the plea of self-preser-
vation carries little weight here. The American
throws aside the whole argument from necessity, to
you so conclusive, because, as I have explained, he
believes you the aggressor. He regards the invasion
of Belgium as a dastardly detail in a sinister campaign
to conquer the world. Furthermore, England has made
all the capital possible out of your breach of law.
England's declaration of war followed your violation
of Belgian neutrality, and she alleged that as her
cause for entry. It was a lucky stroke for the cabal
of politicians that controlled Britain, for they had
committed the naval and military forces of the Empire
to France in secret agreements while they had openly
denied these arrangements in the House of Commons.
They needed an excuse before the country, and Bel-
gium furnished it to them. Sir Edward Grey and his
faction did not stage-manage England's negotiations
for their influence on neutral opinion, but for their
influence on British public opinion and the recruiting
campaign. Nevertheless it had its effect here. Curi-
ously enough there exists in England a strong group
of protest which is not for a moment taken in by the
miserable sham of Grey, Churchill and the rest that
this is a "war to preserve international law" or a "war
to end war" or anything else on Britain's part but a

GERMANY MISJUDGED

war of imperialistic jealousy from top to bottom. But
America, sentimental, credulous, self-righteous, in the
face of the facts, in the face of England's record, be-
lieves that England is fighting for the rights of small
nations.

It is not reasonable to take tragically the violation
of Belgium's neutrality because there was very little
neutrality there to violate. She had practically allied
herself with France and England. To enter into se-
cret military agreements with two of the guarantors
of her neutrality, ostensibly for "defense" but actually
to the detriment of a third guarantor, was not playing
the game fairly. Roland G. Usher, a writer who has
attained prominence in this country by his discussions
of European affairs, wrote in the Nezv Republic,
November 28, 1914:

"The vital difficulty in this question of neutrality
was and is that the territory of Belgium was not and
is not neutral ground. It is literally the front door to
France and the side door to Germany, and its posses-
sion by either is so dangerous to the other that the
moment war breaks out or even becomes probable,
Belgium is either a part of Germany or a part of
France, and hostile territory for whichever of the two
does not hold it. . . . Whatever the diplomatic facts
may be, whatever the technicalities of alliances and
treaties eventually prove to have been, Belgium was
as clearly an ally of France as England was. The
Belgian army and its dispositions, the Belgian forts on
the German frontier, were prepared w-ith the advice,

AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY

at least, of English and French generals. Plans for
the co-operation of the three armies were undoubtedly
made. Let us not quibble over the question whether
this was an infringement of neutrality. The Belgians
knew — let us say it once more — that the neutrality of
Belgium was a fiction because Belgium was not neu-
tral ground."

Quite so. Belgium was not neutral because she had
thrown her sympathies to the French, and because she
had connived with your recognized enemies for the
employment of her military forces. You had a reason-
able suspicion that she w'ould not view a French viola-
tion of her neutrality in the same light as a German
violation. Few Americans realize what the strategic
situation was. They conceive of Belgium merely as
an easy road to France, and the sole purpose of your
invasion to strike a swift blow at France in order to
be able later to turn and deal with Russia. But there
was a more vital matter involved. Belgium borders
on the most vulnerable portion of Germany, the great
industrial district of Westphalia, which includes among
other vital centers Essen and the Krupp gun works.
Essen, though east of the Rhine, is less than one hun-
dred and fifty miles from Antwerp. Cologne, Diissel-
dorf and Krcfeld are nearer. The empire would be
prostrate once this prosperous and thickly populated
region of factories, blast furnaces and steel mills fell
into hostile hands. It is an open secret that the Eng-
lish military leaders had planned in a war with you to
blockade your ports by sea and enter Westphalia by

GERMANY MISJUDGED

land, and so hold Germany by the throat. As a road to
Paris Belgium was an advantage to you; as a gate to
Essen it was a warrant of death. Through Belgium
you could strike France a blow in the face, but through
Belgium France could stab you in the back. That was
the nature of the military necessity.

You suspected, with reason, Belgium's good faith.
The documents found in the archives of the Belgian
general staff in Antwerp merely confirmed in part facts
already thoroughly well known to your military
authorities. But why, asks the American, didn't Ger-
many wait to see if France or England intended to
violate Belgian neutrality? That is the whole point.
You couldn't wait. In our Southwest when a man
reaches for his gun we do not expect the other dispu-
tant to see what use will be made of the gun before he
draws his own. He acts on a presumption. Men who
refuse to act on that sort of presumption soon have
heirs reading their wills. You could not take the
chance of having Belgium used as a weapon to crush
you.

The destruction which hit Belgium, it is true, was a
terrible penalty for her dereliction, or that of her
military rulers. We live in a world where, either for
the nation or the individual, the punishment rarely fits
the crime. When men play with fire they may be
frightfully burnt; and war is the only fire that com-
pares with hell. The apologists and mourners for
Belgium usually contend that she was justified in seek-
ing covert aid against the German menace, which

AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY

proved to be real. Dut she would have had a thousand
times better chance to escape disaster had she practised
a real neutrality and not one interpreted to fit her sup-
posed interests. When history makes its final reckon-
ing, I am sure, Belgium will not be found the "black
indelible blot" on your name which your enemies
would place there. At least you have the satisfaction
of knowing that you went about the business like men,
openly and frankly, without the subterfuge and
hypocrisy practised by the other nations concerned.

Barbarians! Huns!

From the beginning of the war your foes have car-
ried on against you a campaign of atrocity tales as
unscrupulous and mendacious as that conducted by the
Greeks against the Bulgars in the Second Balkan War.
The Belgians issued an official report of alleged Ger-
man barbarities, and the French and English followed
suit. Viscount Bryce, well and favorably known on
this side of the Atlantic, lent his name to the English
version. These canards are widely believed in Amer-
ica, but chiefly, I think, by those who wilfully want to
believe — those whose prejudice blinds them to im-
partial evidence. Responsible American newspaper
correspondents, returned from the front where they
had every opportunity to investigate, have exposed the
fraud again and again. Your own official document
on the conduct of war by the Belgians more than
exonerates you for the reprisal measures you took.
But these were not "atrocities" as advertised.

GERMANY MISJUDGED

Of course no one will assert that the sweep of your
armies through Belgium and France was accomplished
without occasional instances of pillage, rape and mur-
der. Such sporadic lapses into crime are to be expected
in war time. Business is business, says the American ;
in a far truer sense, war is war. We have reason to
believe, however, that the iron discipline of the Prus-
sian armies, unequaled anywhere else, reduces the
number of these offenses to a minimum. The stories
that seep through from France — of the bayoneting of
prisoners, for example, and of German girls shrieking
to be killed — make us skeptical of the effectiveness of
the restraints in the other armies. And what will turn
the stomach of civilization when the final inquest is
held are the barbarities of the Russian hordes. You
know that in East Prussia the atrocities of the Cos-
sacks in 1812, 1813 and 1814 are still recalled, a
century later. And you know what a saturnalia of
outrage, cruelty and torture Russian troops perpetrated
last year in Bukowina, Galicia and East Prussia. The
official German report of the Russian horrors has been
tacitly ignored, although the reports of the "atrocities"
in Belgium have been given the widest possible pub-
licity.

There has grown up, in fact, a legend that the Teuton
in warfare is brutal, savage and ruthless. This legend
has been carefully fostered in England — again to aid
the recruiting campaign ; and it has gained wide-spread
credence in the United States. What has lent color
to the legend more than anything else is the occasional

AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY

slaughter of civilians and non-combatants, — as in the
dropping of Zeppelin bombs on London and other
English towns, the bombardment of the east coast of
England by a German fleet, and the sinking of passen-
ger vessels by submarines. You look upon the killing
of these non-combatants as the regrettable concomitants
of legitimate military projects, but a mind hostile in
opinion to you finds in them proof of your personal
turpitude. In the fog of war we arrive at a curious
mental state. What seems justifiable when done by
our side appears intolerable and execrable when
practised by the enemy. Thus American sympathizers
with the Allies wax hot when German airmen shell
open English towns, but watch with composure when
the aviators of the Allies drop bombs and kill women
and children in the unfortified German towns of
Freiburg, Schlettstadt or Karlsruhe. \Mien the French
use asphyxiating gas they hear the news with grim
satisfaction, but when you use gas they raise a howl
of indignation. When you shell a cathedral tower
they quote the Hague Conventions, but when the Eng-
lish use dum-dum bullets they shrug their shoulders.
Sympathy with a belligerent hardens the heart. To
your ill-wishers in America German heartbreak and
German agony mean nothing, and German deaths are
a cause for rejoicing.

This is the reason why America has not shown
resentment at the cynical inhumanity of England and
France in pitting against you uncivilized yellow, brown
and negroid troops. In the name of civilization and

GERMANY MISJUDGED

the higher culture they have launched on your sons
and husbands the Turco, the Sikh, the Ghoorka, the
Pathany — these savages who cut off the heads of
prisoners, make necklaces of eyes they have gouged
from the wounded, and thrust their knives upward
through the bowels. "From Senegambia, Morocco,
the Soudan, Afghanistan, every wild band of robber
clans, come fighting men to slay the compatriots of
Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Beethoven,
Wagner, Mozart, Diirer, Helmholtz, Hertz, Haeckel,
and a million others, perhaps obscurer, no less noble,
men of the fatherland of music, of philosophy, of
science, and of medicine, the land where education is
a reality and not a farce, the land of Luther and
Melanchthon, the land whose life-blood washed out
the ecclesiastical tyranny of the Dark Ages.
"The Huns!"

Quite frankly the American press wants to see you
beaten in this war, to have "Prussian militarism" wiped
out. H you win, say our sage students of foreign
affairs, you will override the world like a tyrannical
colossus, threatening the life of every free people.
France and England will be annihilated. Who will be
next? Naturally the United States. As our sapient
editors are fond of phrasing it, the United States
"cannot afford" to see the Allies lose.

The desire to see you defeated springs naturally out
of the general feeling of antagonism. Some explana-

AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY

tion of your supposed aggression had to be found.
How was it that you, notoriously a peace-loving peo-
ple, suddenly reached up and pulled down the pillars
of civilization? What was the motive? The answer
has been militarism — together with autocracy, lust for
expansion, delusion of a world mission — but always
first and last, militarism. Nietzsche, Treitschke and
Bernhardi have been pictured as your popular authors
and national guides. The Prussian drill sergeant has
been depicted as your universal educator, who has
drilled your minds as well as your bodies. The House
of Hohenzollcrn has been held up as a dynasty of war-
lords, afilicted with a Caesarian itch to rule the world.

In other words, your defamers do their best to
make of you a bogy. The non-combatant in modern
war loses all touch with fact and comes to paint the
enemy as a monster and a demon. No greater libel
ever has been uttered against a nation than when Ger-
mans are accused of being a race of militarists. A
juster description is that you are the most military
and the least warlike of people. You had in Germany,
of course, as had every other European power, your
pro-war party, and it was an insistent and outspoken
party, but to picture it as anything but a small minority
is to travesty the truth. Your militarists had no more
popular support or more effective grip on the govern-
ment than did the Imperialists of England, or the
Chauvinists of France, or the Irridentists of Italy;
the proof lies in the event!

If you had not maintained a powerful army, where

GERMANY MISJUDGED

would you be now? Here is Germany, completely
ringed with hate-stung foes, battling against odds such
as no other nation ever has had to face, outnumbered
more than two to one — almost three to one — in men,
resources and wealth, fighting to preserve her existence
and even her right to remain a free and united people ;
yet to hear Englishmen and Americans talk one would
imagine that the Allies, rather than Germany, were
the stag at bay ! Of late it has become the fashion in
our journals to cite your "preparedness" as a convinc-
ing proof of a German conspiracy against the peace
of the world. I quote a few phrases from a bitter and
rhetorical article^ in a recent issue of the Saturday
Evening Post : "Germany . . . has hurled calamity on
a continent. She has struck to pieces a Europe whose
very unpreparedness answers her ridiculous falsehood
that she was attacked first;" "Prussia's long-prepared
and malignant assault . . . the deadliest assault ever
made on Democracy;" "Her spring at the throat of
an unsuspecting, unprepared world." There you have
it ! Germany was prepared to meet a dangerous attack
(which actually was made), therefore she must have
invited the attack, nay, perpetrated it. And such non-
sense passes for logic! At the war's beginning your
American enemies predicted that you soon would be
crushed and taught the folly of challenging a fore-
warned world ; now that you are winning, your
victories are cited to show how innocent must have
been the rest of the world so to have been caught

'"The Pentecost of Calamity" by Owen Wister.

AX EXPLANATION TO GERMANY

napping. Either way you are blamed. When you
stand off a world and deal your enemies staggering
blows, you are given no credit for being better gen-
eralled, for having superior physical stamina, for meet-
ing with greater ability the complex industrial and
technical problems of modern war, or for your intenser
moral earnestness, — this passion of conviction which
enables you to unlock such marvelous reserves of
energy.

No, the explanation is always "preparedness." Yet
in all save the intangible racial factors your opponents
were as well prepared as yourselves. The combined
standing armies of Russia and France before the war
numbered 2,010,000 soldiers as against your 870,000,
and the total of their drilled men was 9,500,000 as
against your 5,500,000. Austria and Turkey were more
than offset by Great Britain, Scrvia, Portugal, Italy
and Japan. On the sea the preparedness of the Allies
exceeded yours in the proportion of four to one. The
total output of their arms works and munitions facto-
ries was greater than yours in the same ratio as their
armies, and Schneider-Creusot rivaled Krupp. The
boasts of your enemies last summer, telling what they
would do to you, shows how highly they thought of
their armaments. Is it your reproach or theirs that
those boasts proved somewhat hollow ? Why not
rather give you decent credit for the amazing, almost
incredible, stand you are making?

The overworked assertion that civilization will suffer
if you win is not based on any impartial analysis of

GERMANY MISJUDGED

German character or purposes, or upon a reasoned
forecast of historical probabiHties. It is sheer malice.
Probably there is no settlement of this conflict which
can be entirely satisfactory. For myself I prefer to
see you win, and win decisively. If Germany is de-
stroyed, or even greatly hampered in its normal de-
velopment, one of the world's best hopes will be ex-
tinguished. But if Germany is victorious, the inter-
national situation may be much improved. The world
will be spared an increase in Russia's power, and the
forcible Russification of more victim peoples. We
shall avoid a dangerous aggrandizement in the position
of Japan. A German victory may liberalize the
electoral system of Prussia,* but nothing will liberalize
Russia except a crushing defeat and the withdrawal
of English and French loans to the bureaucracy.
France will not be annihilated, any more than she was
after 1870, though she may be forced to part with a
section of her colonial empire. England will not be
wiped out, but she may be forced to forego the
arrogant assumption that the sea is British property.
The United States can view with composure any
changes in titles to colonies in Africa or the Near East.
You will never cross our path. For one thing you will
be too busy elsewhere!

Alost Americans, of course, do not share this view;
nothing would please them better than to see Germany
brought to her knees. It is this popular desire to see

*Professor Henry C. Emery, "German Economics and the War," Yale
Review, January, 1915.

AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY

you beaten which so complicates the question of our
trade in war munitions. That question has not and
cannot be argued on its merits. However neutral the
United States has been in its official attitude, it is not
neutral in sentiment. Americans are glad to supply
your enemies with arms, because in this way they
can help avenge the "rape of Belgium" and aid in
punishing the "disturber of the world's peace." Tech-
nically, of course, our neutrality is not violated, for
we have the legal right, by historical usage and by
article 7, Convention XIII of the 1907 Hague Confer-
ence, to sell arms anywhere in the world. Neither, on
the other hand, would our neutrality be violated by
placing a complete embargo on the ships carrying
munitions. To right-thinking men and women this
whole business of dealing in instruments of destruc-
tion for profit appears disgusting and abhorrent. How-
ever, the crux of the question is neither neutrality or
ethics. While the Allies control the seas export of
arms aids them, embargo on arms aids you. Conse-
quently outside of German-Americans, there is little
demand that Congress suppress this new and monstrous
billion-dollar industry.

My German friends, there is one last word I would
address to you, and this most earnestly of all. Do not
allow your bitterness against the United States to in-
crease. Do not regard this country as your confirmed
enemy, but as a potential friend. Our nation is much
more divided in its sympathy than it appears to be.
There are over eight million German-Americans in

GERMANY MISJUDGED

America, — immigrants or offspring of immigrants.
There are nearly three milHons from Austria-Hungary.
There are four and a half millions from Ireland, of
whom a large proportion take a pro-German attitude.
Besides these millions there are a vast number of men
and women of older American stock who see the
justice of your struggle, or at least are lenient in their
judgment. The laboring men, the common people
everywhere, do not share the rabid intolerance of our
pseudo-intellectuals. The anti-German attitude of our
press gives a false surface of unanimity to American
opinion. We do not know, as a matter of fact, where
we should stand if your side had adequate and fair
representation in the journals of public discussion.
But be assured of this: what is now called "the Amer-
ican attitude" toward Germany will not endure for-
ever. It is, as I have explained to you, based in large
part on errors in the interpretation of facts. If that is
so, some day these misinterpretations will be refuted
and swept away. At bottom America is fair-minded.
And you have in the United States loyal friends, whose
eyes refuse to be blinded by calumny, who, not una-
ware of your faults, love you for your lofty virtues,
who will fight for you against a world of falsehoods,
until the truth prevails. Dem gliicklichen Tag!

A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND

WHY are you in this war?
You are the English ; you are now, and will
continue to be, a great people. You are at present
united, with the exception of a few ineffective intel-
lectuals, in a resolve to "crush" Germany, to beat her
to her knees, to punish her. Hate, when it permeates
a whole people, becomes a terrible political fact. Yet
there is no reason why neutrals should sanction and
condone British hate any more than German hate, or
Mohammedan hate. Hate always blights, never
creates, and should hate rule the peace and the set-
tlement, whichever side wins in the field, we shall
have a worse Europe than before. It is not, there-
fore, to your half-crazed wartime mood that I appeal,
but to whatever measure of cool reason remains among
you. In every crisis a few Englishmen keep their
heads ; that is one of the sources of British strength.
Let me ask them, without rancor, one question.

What are you fighting for?

You may say that the answer is simple : you are
fighting for democracy, for liberty, for civilization,
for humanity. Permit me to point out that these vague
j)hrases in themselves mean exactly nothing. Each of
the belligerents believes it is fighting for "civilization."

GERMANY MISJUDGED

The idealism of the German people is as sincere, and
their earnestness as intense, to say the least, as your
own. High-sounding pretensions must be translated
into concrete terms to gain significance.

An explanation would come from you in good grace,
for on the face of it your position in the' war is peculiar.
You are fighting on the side of Russia, a despotic and
half-Asiatic power which has little in common with
Western civilization, and whose interests are in no way
identical with those of the British Empire, and you
are fighting against Germany, a people of the same
stock as yourselves, with the same general social pur-
poses, whom the deeper racial and cultural forces
would seem to mark as your natural ally. Indeed,
your choice of sides in this struggle is a great histori-
cal anomaly, second only to the anomaly of the war
itself. How did that alignment come about? Of
course there are reasons. But are the reasons those
which have been alleged by your statesmen and
publicists? Behind this question lies another: What
are you striving to accomplish in this conflict? What
purposes do you hope to achieve by that victory of
which you are still so confident?

This is not an academic discussion. These are politi-
cal questions of the greatest urgency, both for English-
men and, indirectly, for citizens of the United States.
It is of the first importance that we think rightly on
these issues, not merely that we may save our own
souls by finding the truth, but that, having embraced
the truth, we may save Europe and the world.

A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND
II

Are you fighting for iielgium?

You must admit that for many of the British public
Belgium was England's casus belli. Hundreds of
thousands of your best young men have enlisted in
the service of the King, believing that they are taking
up arms to defend a little country against a brutal
aggression. From your press and platform have come
the strongest assertions that England is fighting a
righteous war to vindicate the sanctity of treaties and
uphold the rights of small nations. No consideration
has won you sympathy in neutral countries more
readily than this plea.

Do you still insist on the pose of the knightly
rescuer? Let me call your attention to two or three
incontrovertible aspects of your relation to Belgium.

1. Sir Edward Grey had, in secret commitments,
unconditionally pledged the naval and military forces
of the Empire to France in case of a European war.
These secret agreements, contracted as far back as
1906 and frequently renewed, known to only a few
members of the Cabinet, were not announced to Parlia-
ment and the British nation until August 3, 1914, when
the armies of the Continent were already on the march.
They would have thrown you into war in any case,
Belgium or no Belgium. It is said on good authority
that Sir Edward Grey planned, in event of repudiation
by his own Cabinet, to form a Coalition Cabinet in
August, 1914 — as was done months later — and proceed
to carry out his "obligations of honor." That these

GERMANY MISJUDGED

agreements were contracted in secret, without the
knowledge of the British people, does not alter the
fact that they were a binding action of the British
government.

2. Germany made a definite bid for your neutrality
on the score of Belgian integrity. If your government
had been actuated by any idealistic concern for small
nationalities why did it not intervene to preserve
Belgium when it could? Sir Edward Grey was asked
point blank by Ambassador Lichnowsky whether he
would keep Britain out of the war if Belgian neutrality
were respected (celebrated dispatch No. 123, British
White Paper). Your Foreign Secretary answered,
no, his hands must be free, — meaning, of course, that
his hands already were tied. When war came. Great
Britain's action was mortgaged. "If France became
involved we should be drawn in" (No. 111). England
might have, indeed would have, saved Belgium had
Belgian welfare been a primary object of British
statesmanship ; but it was not.

3. Belgium was used shamelessly as a pawn in the
great game between the Triple Alliance and the Triple
Entente. Your little neighbor, by the accident of its
position, is of the greatest strategic importance, either
for an offensive against France or an ofifensive against
Germany. Your Foreign Office urged the Belgians to
"maintain to the utmost of their power their neutral-
ity" (White Paper No. 115). France pressed armed
aid on Belgium before its course was announced.
British and French strategists for years had been

A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND

hatching secret mihtary plans with the Belgian Gen-
eral Staff. These plans did not, it is true, foreshadow
direct aggression on Belgium, but surely they indicated
the most cynical willingness to use the Belgian army
as a first line of defense for the Entente. When war
broke out the "plucky Belgians" rendered you a most
valuable service in delaying the march of the Teutonic
hosts. What, I ask you in all frankness, did you do
for Belgium ? Belgium was desolated ; she was caught
and ground to pieces between the huge rival alliances
of Europe. The action of your government, playing
the game of the balance of power, amounted to nothing
less than a ghastly betrayal of Belgian interests.

The above observations, I submit, are based on
facts ; I do not admit that they are disputable. I give
them thus briefly because they have been emphasized
already by many British writers. I need mention only
the names of Dr. F. C. Conybeare,^ E. D. Morel,^
H. N. Brailsford,^ Ramsay Macdonald,^ and Bernard
Shaw,^ Even the London Times, in a leader of March
12, 1915, repudiated chivalry for Belgium: "Herr von
Bethmann-Hollweg is quite right. Even had Germany
not invaded Belgium, honor and interest would have
united us with France."

Yet I know what reply you, the better class of
Englishmen, would give to the foregoing. You would

'Conybeare, letter in f'ital Issue.
'Morel, Letter to Birkenhead Liberal Association.
'Brailsford, Belgium and "The Scral> of Paper."
*Macdonald, Statement in the Labor Leader.
°Shaw, Common Sense About the War.

GERMANY MISJUDGED

say: "This indictment of the past is all very well. I
dare say our statesmen juggled with Belgium, and I
have never been a partisan of secret diplomacy. That
is no reason why we should forsake Belgium now.
The bald fact remains that she has been trampled under
foot by Germany, that she is now invaded and held in
subjection. It is England's duty to fight on until the
last invader is cleared from Belgian soil."

I give you full credit for honesty in this sentiment.
Your aim is generous; but you have chosen futile
means. You wish to avenge Belgium by force of arms.
It cannot be done.

Suppose you are successful ; that you drive back
the Germans, yard by yard, to their own territory.
What does that mean for Belgium? Merely a second
devastation more terrible than the first. By again
making Belgium the world's battlefield, you will scorch
her bare. There is a better way out. Why should
Germany care to retain Belgian territory? Only as a
weapon against you. "Antwerp is a pistol pointed at
the heart of England." Strategically Belgium has
value ; politically and financially she would be a liabil-
ity. As soon as you convince the Germans that Eng-
land is not perpetrating a huge aggression to destroy
her, Belgium will be evacuated without cost to the
Belgians; not before. I agree that no settlement of
this conflict can be satisfactory which does not restore
Belgium's independence and make her such measure
of reparation as may be possible. But in that reparation
you have a share to pay as well as Germany.

A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND

Let US, in the name of decency, drop this twaddle
about the rights of small nationalities. Consider your
allies. You stood calmly aside when Russia throttled
Finland, and when she crushed Persian independence
with atrocities more gruesome than the alleged German
atrocities. You applauded Japan in violating China's
neutrality to march on Kiao Chou. Your Foreign
Office actively supported France when she tore up the
public law of Europe as embodied in the Act of
Algeciras and subjected Morocco to military terrorism
and financial strangulation. Do you insist on one
moral code for your enemies and approve an opposite
for your friends? Your own record in Ireland should
close your lips against pious platitudes about small
nations. You did not enter this war to protect Bel-
gium. You will never render her effective service
until you are prepared to bargain concessions or
colonies to secure her interests. That, apparently, you
are not ready to do.

What are you fighting for? Not Belgium!

Ill

Possibly you are in this war to safeguard France.
La Belle France! You could not bear to see your
closest friend crushed to earth. If that is your motive
it is a laudable one. The whole world holds France
precious.

You will admit, however, that this deep affection is
rather a sudden attachment. For centuries the French
and British peoples fought and snarled at one another.

GERMANY MISJUDGED

You hated France when France was strong. Even
within the last quarter century there were three occa-
sions when you stood on the brink of war with her, —
over Siam, West Africa, and the Nile Valley
(Fashoda). But in 1904 your Foreign Office reached
a general agreement with France on all outstanding
disputes. In 1906 it came to an understanding with
Russia, and so the Entente Cordiale was formed. From
that day on the peace of Europe was never safe. While
the Triple Alliance was the most powerful military
force in Europe the dogs were chained, but when a
stronger combination (presumably) arose, the politics
of Europe steadily underwent a sinister transforma-
tion. Let us see what happened.

The British Foreign Office definitely abandoned
Salisbury's policy of a Concert for a system of rival
military groups. The Entente did not confine itself
to a defensive league against a possible attack, but
began openly or clandestinely to balk and bully and
injure its rivals in time of peace. Sir Edward Grey
at once signed a general Anglo-French declaration
regarding Egypt and Morocco, in which the French
government averred that it had no intention "of altering
the political status of Morocco." This was followed
by the publication of a Franco-Spanish declaration of
similar tenor. At the same time that these public
declarations of good faith appeared Sir Edward Grey
entered into secret agreements with France and Spain
which provided for the partition of Morocco between
tlie two latter countries and rendered the integrity of

A QUKSTIOX FOR KNCLAND

the Moorish kingdom a sham." Germany had vast
economic interests in Morocco. What became of
them? They were wrested from her. Germany was
robbed, underhandedly, and furthermore was humili-
ated, insulted, slapped in the face. Morocco, whose
independence was guaranteed not only by the public
declarations of 1904, but also by the international Act
of Algeciras of 1906, signed by all the powers, was
ruthlessly reduced to a French dependency. Morocco
in time of "peace" was treated worse than Belgium in
time of war.

To all this Germany did not submit without a pro-
test. She intervened twice, once at Tangier in the
person of the Emperor, and again at Agidir with the
Panther. In these interventions she was entirely
within her rights, and in accord with what Mr. Morel
calls "the fundamental legality of her attitude." And
both times Europe nearly plunged into war because
Britain interfered to back up France in an aggression
where she was morally and legally wrong. In both
instances, mind you, your Foreign Office did not inter-
fere with merely diplomatic weapons, but with the
threat of the whole militarv and naval forces of Great

•The Moroccan intrigue served more than anything else to embitter
Anglo-German relations, and helped to usher in the present war. The
autiiority for the statements in the text is to be found in Morocco in
Diplomacy by E. D. Morel, first published in London in 1912, and
reissued as Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy in 1915. Mr. Morel pre-
sents the history of the affair with such a wealth of detailed proof, with
such evident impartiality and with so genuine a concern for the best
interests of England and of Europe that I venture to state no fair-
minded man can read the book unconvinced.

GERMANY MISJUDGED

Britain, — offered, in the event of a Franco-German
rupture, to mobilize the fleet, seize the Kiel canal and
land 100,000 men in Schleswig-Holstein. These facts
were laid bare in the Lausanne disclosures of 1905
and the Faber revelations of 1911. One immediate
effect was to leave the whole German nation rocking
and seething with indignation, and to convince Ger-
many that England would precipitate a European war
on the first pretext.

In the end Germany lost all of her interests in
Morocco, though a slice of land in the interior of the
French Congo was thrown to her as a sop. The secret
clauses of the 1904 Declarations finally were revealed
in Le Temps and Le Matin, November, 1911. But
Germany had wind of them as early as October, 1904.
Says Mr. Morel (remember that he wrote in 1912) :
"Thenceforth dated the situation which for more than
seven years has poisoned the whole European atmos-
phere, embroiled British, French, German, and Spanish
relations, and placed an enormous and constantly grow-
ing burden of added expenditure upon the peoples of
those countries. Thenceforth dated the situation which
Sir Edward Grey, instead of seeking to improve by
orienting his policy after Algeciras in a more friendly
spirit toward Germany — retaining what was good but
rejecting what was bad in the policy of his predeces-
sor— has aggravated and worsened to such a degree
that only yesterday we escaped a general conflagration.
Veritably the process of being a party to the stealing
of another man's land brings with it its own Nemesis.

A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND

Unfortunately it is the people in whose name, but
without whose sanction, these things are done, who
have to pay." And again: "I understand that in the
current jargon of diplomacy that sort of thing is called
'high politics.' The plain man may be permitted to
dub it by one word only — dishonesty."

Yes, it was dishonest diplomacy, just as it was dis-
honest statesmanship in 1914 to deny in the House of
Commons that the country was pledged to France,
and then to reveal, after war actually had broken out,
secret obligations of honor. England's naval and mili-
tary power has been mortgaged to France in case of a
war with Germany for the last ten years, uncon-
ditionally, and without reference, apparently, to the
nature of the quarrel and the crisis. It was so in
1905, it was so in 1911, and it was so in August, 1914.
The British Foreign Office had become saturated with
anti-German feeling, with suspicion and unfairness.
This anti-German cabal, typified by such men as
Tyrrell, Nicholson and Bertie, did all it could to stul-
tify international good-will, and, through the press, to
prejudice and emlMtter public opinion. Sir Edward
Grey worked hand and glove with this cabal, although
his anti-Germanism seems to have been diluted with
a pale pacifism which made him shudder, at the last
moment, on the edge of that catastrophe he had done
so much to make inevitable. The culpability of
Britain is no less because these machinations were car-
ried on behind the scenes and without the overt sanc-
tion of the British people. In foreign affairs the

GERMANY MISJUDGED

Foreign Office was Britain, And when the great test
came it was able to carry the country into war.

For France, then, are you fighting? For the France
of gaiety, of beauty, of philosophy? What did your
diplomatic intriguers care for the ideal France ? They
were playing a high and baleful game, the game of
the Balance of Power, in which Germany was to be
outmatched, the game of the ring-fence. England's
creation of the Entente, or rather the way she manipu-
lated her influence after it was accomplished, had an
evil influence on the politics of both her allies. In
Russia the loans of British gold strengthened a weak-
ening bureaucracy ; the decline of the Duma dates
from that sinister aid.'^ In France it caused the fires
of La Revanche to burn brighter. It gave political
power to the French Colonial Party and threw the
republic into the hands of adventurers. It thwarted
every movement toward a Franco-German rapproche-
ment, inspiring, for example, those influences which
brought about the overthrow of Caillaux. Was ever
game more stupid, or in the end more disastrous? As
it was diplomacy without honesty, so it was statesman-
ship without enlightenment. What price Britain pays
we already begin to see. It served directly and need-
lessly to undermine what is one of the greatest interests
of true statesmanship, the peace of the world.

And mark you! This France to which you so ef-
fectively allied yourself was bound by the strongest

'See Persia, Finland, and our Russian Alliance, pamphlet of the
Independent Labor Party.

A yUKSTKJX I'UH ENGLAND

of agreements to Russia. Her war policy was part
and parcel of Russia's policy. Why is France now
at war? Is it because she was wantonly invaded by
Germany, or because she is fulfilling her pledges to
Russia? Let there be no mistake in this matter.
France came into the struggle automatically as Rus-
sia's ally. Though there was some silly pose at the
beginning — what Americans would call "a grandstand
play" — about withdrawing ten kilometers behind the
frontier, there never was any doubt as to France's
action. "France is resolved to fulfil all the obligations
of her alliance."^ Yet this quarrel was at first a Rus-
sian affair. It was a dispute over the Balkans between
Servia and Russia on one side and Austria and Ger-
many on the other. Let me quote another English-
man. G. Lowes Dickinson says:^ "So far as Russia
is concerned, I believe Germany to be on the defensive."
Well, if that is so, then Germany is on the defensive
against the world. The nations had strung themselves
on a single cord, the handle to which was the Franco-
Russian alliance. When Russia jerked that handle,
the nations were all pulled in, — France, Great Britain,
Belgium. France was a link; you are really the ally
of Russia.

To be the ally of unregenerate, medieval Russia is
a national infamy. But you cannot see that.

The attitude of cultivated Englishmen toward Rus-

•Statement of Viviani to the French embassadors at St. Petersburg
and London, July 30. 1914. French Yellow Book, No. 101.
*The IVar and the IVay Out, p. 16.

GERMANY MISJUDGED

sia illustrates how the partisanship of war warps the
mind. At one time you understood the real Russia
and dreaded and abhorred that reign of the secret
police called its government. But an ally can do no
wrong. So far as possible Englishmen now mentally
turn their backs on Russia, and whenever they are
forced to look at her they put on rose-colored spectacles
lest they see the truth. Arnold Bennett, in one of the
most unsportsmanlike defenses^" of British diplomacy
which has been published, declares that so far as Eng-
land is concerned, Russia is an accident. An accident!
An accident composed of 170,000,000 people which in-
creases at the rate of 3,000,000 a year, with all those
millions conscripted and marshalled by the most soul-
less, oppressive, unscrupulous autocracy in the world!
For the Germans this vast Tatar nation is no accident.
"We in the West, as Marcel Sembat pointed out some
months before he entered the French Cabinet, have
never quite realized how Germans regard Russia. For
us she is a safely distant power. We can afford to
think of her novels and her music. W^e can personify
her as a nation which produced Tolstoy and Kropot-
kin.^^ We know her through her exiles. For the Ger-
mans she is the semi-barbarous neighbor across the
frontier, with the population which is eighty per cent
illiterate, and those Cossacks whose name still recalls
the devastations of the Seven Years War."^^ Yet the

'iRropotkin by all means. See his The Terror in Russia, 1909.
"H. N. Brailsford in The New Republic, July 24, 1915.

A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND

truth about Russia is not hard to ascertain. Since the
war started all the forces of reaction have been
strengthened. The labor leaders, every liberal element,
have been terrorized ; the Jews, already ground under
heel, have been subjected to new and horrible indigni-
ties ; all constitutional rights in Finland have been
stamped out. The Duma has been prorogued and
silenced. Russia uses the support of her liberal allies
to slump further back into despotism. This war is
the great catastrophe ; it overshadows all else. But the
next greatest crime against civilization is the fact that
the three greatest cultural nations of the West, Eng-
land, Germany and France, instead of standing
shoulder to shoulder against the Asiatic powers, are
tearing at each other's vitals, with two of the three
arrayed against the third at the behest and in the
interest of this unspeakable bureaucracy. Who is re-
sponsible for this irrational, this unholy alliance? I
leave the answer to you.

"But away with all this talk of policies and politics,"
you cry. "Let us get down to the fundamental issue,
Germany herself. Why are we at war? Look at our
foe for your answer! We could not abide a world
forever overawed by this menace of Prussianism!
These barbarians ! These veritable Huns ! This mod-
ern Attila! This perverted nation of militarists! This
incarnate blood-lust and egotism ! This — "

Save your vocabulary. We have heard more than

GERMANY MISJUDGED

enough of vituperation within the past year. I know
that you, the better class of EngHshmen — and that is
the only sort I am addressing — have had no part in
the shameless and cowardly abuse of Germans which
has filled your press during the war period. Still it is
true, I believe, that your conception of Germany is
compounded in part of fictions. How could it be
otherwise? For a decade certain sections of British
opinion have made it their interest to slander and mis-
represent your great Teutonic neighbor. Within the
last months these defamers have used their blackest
colors; they do not picture a people at all, but a
grotesque caricature of something which started out
to be superhuman and ended in being inhuman. Out
of the fog of war they have fashioned a bogy, a mon-
ster which bears no more resemblance to the Germany
across the North Sea than does an image of Moloch
to a man. All Englishmen appear to share, in greater
or less degree, this bogy-belief.

To refute each canard, to strip bare and expose each
fiction, would be impossible. But some categorical
statements should be made. Germans are not inhuman
brutes, delighting in atrocities ; in the conduct of this
war they have shown themselves no more cruel and
brutal than the French, and far less so than the Rus-
sians and your brown and black native troops. The
Teuton is not by nature bestial, bloodthirsty, or merci-
less any more than is the Briton or any other civilized
European, and he yields to the evil passions of war no
more readily. Germanic civilization is not inferior to

A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND

French or English or ItaHan civihzation, though dif-
ferent; on the contrary it might well be maintained
that the only nation which has abolished poverty, the
one whose educational system is the best in the world,
whose municipal governments are models, which out-
strips all nations in scientific and industrial energy,
shows distinct elements of superiority. The Germans
are not mad with military ambition, nor bent on any
career of world conquest, determined to impose the
German language and German institutions on unwill-
ing peoples. They asked for a place in the sun. But
a place in the sun is not the whole earth.

Come, let us be reasonable. In plain justice you
must admire the Germans, even though you do not
love them. If Anglo-Saxon civilization is musk in
your nostrils, Teutonic civilization cannot be stench.
In the arts of peace the Germans challenge emulation.
In war they are the astonishment of all history. No
other people could have withstood so overwhelming a
coalition. Not only in a military and technical man-
ner are they proving their strength, but in a moral and
intellectual way too. In England you have an op-
pressive censorship ; and you have lost for the time
being many of your constitutional rights. In Ger-
many the censorship confines itself to its proper duty
of suppressing military information ; there the most
unfriendly news is published, including the daily Brit-
ish and French war bulletins ; in any German city one
may read the current English and French newspapers,
and buy the books and pamphlets written to expose

GERMANY MISJUDGED

German guilt. Is it so with you? Or in Russia or
France? Does this mean anything except that the
German people, alone among the belligerents, are al-
lowed freely to face the truth? And there are Eng-
lishmen who still speak of this as the Kaiser's war, or
a Junkers' war!

For the Germans this is a people's war, in the fullest
sense of the term. The great spiritual fact of the
struggle is this flaming, unbroken conviction of the
German people that they are right. Though your
statesmen may have been successful with Russia,
France and Italy, they have done very badly with
Germany. They have not left a single German, high
or low, with the smallest doubt that Britain engineered
a conspiracy to destroy its rival. The explanation is
simple. The Germans look to history, remote and
recent. Englishmen work themselves into a great
consternation over what Prussian militarism is going
to do; and they try to frighten neutrals with pen-
pictures of its future depredations. But Germans
point to the actual performances of Prussian militar-
ism, and contrast them with the concrete performances
of British imperialism.

They point out, for example, that this terrible
menace of Prussianism, to which you impute such evil
designs, has kept the peace in Europe since 1870; that
it never seized a favorable opportunity to precipitate
war, and neglected to attack Russia when crippled by
Japan, France during the Dreyfus affair, England
when the Boers disclosed her weakness. They recall

A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND

that the German government, in the face of a hostile
press at home, sacrificed German interests in Morocco
in order to avoid a European conflagration. And they
ask, has British imperiahsm ever refrained from ag-
gression when its "interests" were involved? England
has formed coalitions successively against Spain, Hol-
land and France; she has swept from the sea every
fleet which dared to rival her own. Her recent atti-
tude toward Germany has been of a piece with this
historic policy ; the efforts of her statesmen have aimed
consistently at the enfeeblement and the isolation of
Germany.

One of the British prophets of this war was Pro-
fessor Cramb. In his book he wrote : " 'France,' said
Bismarck in September, 1870, 'must be paralyzed ; for
she will never forgive us our victories.' And in the
same spirit Treitschke avers: England will never for-
give us our strength. And not without justice he
delineates English policy throughout the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries as aimed consistently at the
repression of Prussia."

What are you fighting for?

Here is your answer. The repression of Prussia!
Since Germany became a power, and particularly since
she began to build a navy, she aroused increasing dis-
like and distrust amongst you. In 1897 the Saturday
Review announced the slogan Germaniam esse delen-
dam, and that program has been steadily backed by
a powerful element of British opinion. Your states-
men have pursued the old, unimaginative politics of

GERMANY MISJUDGED

annoyances and curbs ; they have done their utmost
to balk every German attempt at expansion in Africa
or in Asia, and sometimes their interference has been
nothing short of wantonly malicious, as in the instances
of Morocco and of the Bagdad Railw^ay. Militarism
in Germany? Of course there is militarism there, and
some of its aspects are not bright. But why not?
British policy for a decade and more has done all in
its power to create a military temper in Germany, to
throw her into the hands of the war party, and to lash
into being that tigerish ferocity with which she now
fights you. Commercial jealousy and irritation in
manufacturing circles, blended with imperialistic
voracity and certain calculations (or miscalculations)
of high politics, have led Great Britain into an anti-
German policy and an anti-German war.

You will resent this answer to our question. To
declare that England is fighting, not for Belgium, not
for France, not for the sanctity of treaties or human
rights, but merely for selfish imperialistic reasons, and
rather ill-conceived reasons at that, strikes you, I am
sure, as grossly distorted. When you look into your
own souls you find no such sordid motives. You find
only an intense love of England and of England's
honor, and a sense of British quality and worth. I
know how you feel and I know that the things you
cherish are realities. But these noble realities, I sub-
mit, have very little to do with the beginning of this
war, or its end.

And you could see this too, were you able, even for

A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND

one brief liour, to throw yourselves into complete sym-
pathy with your opponents, and look at the world
tlirough their eyes. Had you attempted any such
sympathetic understanding of Germany two years ago,
this war, I am convinced, never would have happened.
You would have seen that the very future existence
of Germany depends on her overseas markets, and
that she must be able to guard these at all costs. As
it is, you have been applying one logic to Germany and
another to England. You have looked upon the Ger-
man navy as an impertinence and a threat, even though
the growth of the German navy has been accompanied
by a constant demand for the freedom of the seas
(i. e., the abolition of the capture of private property
at sea). But you have never been able to see that the
British navy, nearly twice as large, is a threat (to
Germany and possibly to others) especially when ac-
companied by a stubborn and effective refusal to have
the seas neutralized. You could denounce colonial
greed in Germany, and stand ready to fight her if she
acquired an African colony, or a naval base in the
Atlantic ; but British expansion, though unlimited,
seemed justified, no matter at whose expense ; and you
could applaud when Bonar Law announced in July,
1915, that the Entente Allies had torn from the Teutons
450,000 square miles of colonial possessions. What is
meat for you, you declare to be poison for Germany.
You tried, in your supremacy, to enforce a dictation
on others to which you would not submit for a moment.
The worst you can properly say of Germany is that

GERMANY MISJUDGED

she challenged that supremacy, and that she may yet
force you to treat her as an equal.

The vital question remains: What of the future?
The past is past; it must bury its dead. To fix the
blame, to point the accusing finger, to try to anticipate
the condemnation of history, is in itself a fruitless
task. After all, the stupidest people in the world are
they who — on whichever side — wish to "punish" some
one for this war, — this ultimate calamity in which each
belligerent shares a portion of the guilt. What strikes
one in this gigantic struggle between the British and
German nations is not so much its wickedness and its
fierceness, as its needlessness, its utter irrationality.
Germany is, as I said before, your natural ally; there
are a thousand valid reasons for friendship to one
valid reason for hostility. Is it too late to hope for a
reconciliation between these two great peoples which
are so alike in their virtues, however much they may
differ in their faults? I think you begin to see what
a task you have on your hands in seeking to humble
a nation so strong and so indignant as Germany. How-
ever the war results, neither Germany nor England
can be annihilated. And that is well, for there is room
for both in the world. The highest ideal of inter-
national development is not a level uniformity, but
many divergent cultures, each intensifying its own
peculiar merits. Will it be impossible for the English
to put their pride — even though it turn out to be a
wounded pride — behind them, and make that great
effort toward a sympathetic understanding of Ger-

A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND

many whicli should have been made long ago? We
may hope that the effort can be made, for in the final
restoration of Anglo-German friendship lies one of
the world's best hopes, and the strongest guarantee of
future peace.

FRANCE !

THERE are times when we have to speak sharply
to those we love best. The friends of France
will remonstrate with her, and the sincerer their af-
fection the plainer will be their speech.

For France is living in a dream, wrapped in illusion.
Because she suffers much she thinks her cause is just,
and because her soul is high she imagines her deed is
good. Every nation at war tends to idealize its mo-
tives, and this is particularly true of this world-war, —
possibly just for the reason that most of its causes
were selfish. The nations enlist under the banners of
truth and righteousness, of humanity and pity, of
liberty and civilization. But the discerning everywhere
see through the sham. In England there are people
who call this sort of thing "tosh," and in America
there are many who call it "buncombe." In most
countries these grandiose sentiments are not taken
with entire seriousness ; but with you, apparently, yes.
No motive is too altruistic or too noble for you to pro-
claim. You furnish the world an example of national
self-deception.

The truth is often like a shower of ice-water. It
is gratifying to vaunt the glory of France or to inveigh
against the wickedness of the enemy; but it is not so

FRANCE

pleasant to talk of secret treaties, of Russian securities
held by French investors, of the subjugation of
Morocco, or of the intrigues of the Colonial party.
Yet the one is ebullitions of the war spirit, while the
other represents the realities of history. The French
are a proud, a gifted, and a sensitive race. But does
your pride exempt you from facing the facts? Why
is it that you ignore or slur over aspects of this strug-
gle which are so desperately clear to an outsider?

Any sane discussion of the part France is playing
in the war must center about the Franco-Russian
alliance. That is the cardinal fact. A quarrel breaks
out between Servia and Austria-Hungary. The occa-
sion is the murder of the Austrian heir, but the real
dispute is the balance of power in the Balkans. To
settle the supremacy of the Near East, Germany and
Russia fly at one another's throats. But the West is
dragged in, and the whole world flames up, — for w'hat
reason? Because France acts with Russia. France
makes Russian interests, Russian designs, Russian
ambitions, her own.

G. Lowes Dickinson calls this long-standing bargain
of yours with the Terror in the North an "unholy
alliance." But let that go for the moment. The
motives which prompted France to champion Russia
are a separate question. First of all let us agree on
the simple fact that France's action was conditioned on
that of her ally. There has been a notable lack of
straightforwardness in discussing this point, and some
of you have tried to delude yourselves into the notion

GERMANY MISJUDGED

that you were wantonly attacked. At the beginning
of the war, for example, your political and military
leaders showed the greatest concern not to commit
any act of "aggression." French troops were with-
drawn ten kilometers behind the frontier. Was this
ostrich-like act of innocence undertaken to impress
the French populace, or to impress the outside world?
Can you deny that France was already committed to
fight for her northern ally? Was there anything at
all which Germany could have done, or left undone,
which would have kept you out?

On July 29, 1914, the Russian ambassador at Paris
telegraphed to Sazonof : "Viviani has just confirmed
to me the French government's firm determination to
act in concert with Russia. This determination is
upheld by all classes of society and by the political
parties, including the Radical Socialists" (Russian
Orange Book, No. 55). The same day Sazonof tele-
graphed back : "Please inform the French govern-
ment . . . that we are sincerely grateful to them for
the declaration which the French ambassador made me
on their behalf, to the effect that we could count clearly
upon the assistance of our ally, France. In the
existing circumstances, that declaration is especially
valuable to us" (Orange Book, No. 58).

These quotations are from a hundred possible.
Every line in both the Russian Orange Book and the
French Yellow Book confirms the allegiance of France
to Russia. Every statesman in Europe knew what
your attitude would be. The Germans understood it;

FRANCE

yet they pressed you for an open statement of your
intentions. Your only answer was to mobilize the en-
tire army and the fleet.

Viviani acted throughout in complete subservience
to Russia. At the same time he acted with a re-
markable absence of candor toward Germany. Let
me illustrate. On July 31 he informed his ambassador
at St. Petersburg that "Baron von Schoen [German
ambassador at Paris] finally asked me, in the name of
his government, what the attitude of France would be
in case of a war between Germany and Russia. He
told me that he would come for my reply tomorrow
[Saturday] at 1 o'clock. / have no intention of mak-
ing any statement to him on this subject, and I shall
confine myself to telling him that France will have re-
gard to her interests. The government of the Re-
public need not indeed give any account of her inten-
tions except to her ally" (French Yellow Book, No.
117). On the following day, August 1, Viviani had
the audacity to telegraph to his ambassadors abroad,
"This attitude of breaking oflF diplomatic relations
without direct dispute, and although he [i. e., Baron
von Schoen] has not received any definitely negative
ansiver, is characterirtic of the determination of Ger-
many to make war against France" (Yellow Book, No.
120). How, in the name of Janus, was Germany to
receive "any definitely negative answer" if Viviani
refused to "make any statement on this subject"?
What would you call this sort of thing in ordinary
aflfairs, — hypocrisy or deceit? This attempt to cloak

GERMANY MISJUDGED

hostile designs with silence deceives no one; it was
perfectly clear what French "intentions" were. You
intended to strike Germany from the west, should she
be at war with Russia in the east.

Let us not try to evade a patent truth. The histori-
cal fact, from which there is no escape, is that you
were bound to go in if Russia went in. Perhaps your
treaty made it obligatory on you to fight by the side
of Russia; in any event there was no disposition on
the part of your leaders to keep the sword sheathed.
All that talk in the days of the crisis about patrols
crossing the frontiers, about German troops firing on
French outposts, and about French aeroplanes flying
over German territory, does not touch the core of the
situation. These allegations, from whichever side,
are mere banalities and pose. The die was cast; it
had been cast for years. Even if you impute the most
sinister motives to Germany, even if you prove to
your own satisfaction that she started on a career of
world domination, you do not demonstrate that she
wanted to make war on France in 1914. W'hatever
her motives, Germany would have preferred to deal
with one enemy at a time, would she not? It would
have been far better for her, you must acknowledge,
to fight Russia alone, than to grapple at the same time
with Russia, France, England, and all their allies.

For you, therefore, to declare that you suffered an
unprovoked attack, and that you are now purely on
the defensive, is to fall short of an honest avowal.
Germany, it is true, sent you an ultimatum and put a

FRAN'CE

time-limit on your preparations ; and at the end of that
limit she invaded your territory. These, however,
were acts necessary to her plan of strategy. She knew
you were bent on fighting. Why should she not seize
the initial advantage? If you persist in describing
yourselves as being on the defensive it is merely be-
cause no nation ever admits that it is acting on the
aggressive. Of this there is a striking example in
French history. Napoleon Bonaparte toyed with the
notion that he was merely defending himself. In Sir
Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon the following conver-
sation between the emperor and his minister Decres
is recorded. The conversation takes place immediately
after Napoleon's marriage with Maria Louisa.

Napoleon — "The good citizens rejoice sincerely at
my marriage, monsieur?"

Decres — "Very much, Sire."

Napoleon — "I understand they think the lion will
go to slumber, ha?"

Decres — "To speak the truth, Sire, they entertain
some hopes of that nature."

Napoleon — "They are mistaken: yet it is not the
fault of the lion : slumber would be as agreeable to
him as to others. But see you not that while I have
the air of being the attacking party, I am, in fact,
acting only on the defensive?"

There has been altogether too much use made of
this phrase "on the defensive." If you, France, are
on the defensive, it is only in that attenuated sense
that a victory of Germany over Russia would have

GERMANY MISJUDGED

tilted the balance of power in favor of Germany. But
why were you interested in the balance of power?
\Miy were you, the innocent and idealistic French,
interested in wars and military combinations? The
whole question, you see, simmers down to this : Why
were you in alliance with Russia?

Surely it was not on account of sympathy with the
Russian government. There were never two more
oddly assorted yoke-mates than republican, intellectual
France, and autocratic, illiterate Russia. Whatever
way you look at it, Russia is the most backward power
of Europe, industrially, educationally and politically.
A great deal of nonsense has been published in France
lately, the purpose of which is to eulogize the Rus-
sians and to paint in bright colors the drab reality.
Attention has been called to Russian art, music, litera-
ture. But this is simply to magnify the exceptional.
Every one admits that Muscovite culture has pro-
duced a few rare flowers, just as every one admits
that potentially the Russian civilization has admirable
aspects, realizable after it has emerged from medieval-
ism. The typical Russia of today, however, is not a
few revolutionists, nor a handful of intellectuals
excoriating their government. The typical Russia is
the secret police, the superstitious millions, the military
despotism, the Siberia of exile, the grave of a dozen
nationalities, and the gehenna of the Jews. That is
Russia as the whole world knows it, and no amount of
sentiment or whitewash can hide the truth. The whole

FRANCE

world knows, too, that Russia changes, and can change,
very slowly.

Yet into the arms of this cruel and unscrupulous
bureaucracy France threw herself unreservedly. She
formed with the Bear of the North a binding military
alliance which has brought her, at the last, to the
supreme ordeal and sacrifice she now undergoes. Her
motive could not have been fear. A France pacific in
aim, and unallied with great military powers, would
have been no more the object of suspicion, or the
victim of aggressive designs, than would Switzerland.
Germany would not have molested a non-militarist
France, for Germany had defeated France thoroughly,
and extirpated French influence from her internal
politics. There's the rub! Germany had defeated
France in 1870-71. She had humbled France as she
had never been humbled before. She had taken
Alsace-Lorraine, borderland provinces, neither exactly
French nor exactly German, as the visible badge of
her triumph. Formerly these two provinces belonged
to the German empire, and were taken in the midst of
peaceful conditions without even a show of right.
Lorraine became French, but Alsace remained Ger-
man with the exception of a small district on the
southern frontier.

France formed the alliance with Russia when sting-
ing from the bitterness of that defeat of 1870 — 71.
Russia afforded the hope of an ultimate revenge. Rus-
sia was courted, flattered, financed. French gold
bought Russian securities in such quantities that the

GERMANY MISJUDGED

whole of thrifty France came to have an economic
interest in maintaining the pohtical mesalliance.

Bismarck said that France would never forgive
Germany her victories. Apparently he spoke the
truth. France fights to restore Alsace-Lorraine. Yet
is it because the inhabitants of that territory have been
oppressed? You will complain that when your troops
entered Alsace at the beginning of the war they were
treated to poisoned wells and were shot in the back
by the peasants. The Alsatians are among the bravest
and most loyal of German soldiers, — these Alsatians
you wanted to "liberate." You fight to recover
provinces which do not want to be recovered — for the
final glory of France. La Revanche! Yet after all is
not revenge a very human motive?

Yes, revenge is very human, but it can hardly serve
as an excuse for dragging the West into a war over
the Balkans, and for decimating the whole of Europe.
Revenge is supposed to be more the attribute of the
Red Indian than of the civilized modern. Why should
France alone be incapable of forgetting a past defeat?
Why should she cherish the spark of hatred for more
than a generation, waiting the hour to blow it into
flame? The alignment in this war shows how many
hatreds, how many revenges, have been foregone.
Russia fights by the side of England and Japan : she
forgets Crimea and the Yalu. Germany and Austria,
once enemies, are not merely allies, they are a single
unit of military administration. Italy was a member
of the Triple Alliance (although no one can recall the

FRANCE

fact without shame). Bulgaria linked with Turkey, —
who would have thought it possible? You, France,
you alone, pursued a policy of historic revenge. You
alone found a wounded pride too sore for healing. For
forty years the black ribbons of mourning fluttered
from the statue of Strassburg. You have taken them
off now, — to place them on a million graves.

But you did not want war, you are protesting. The
mass of the French people were pacific. That must
be admitted. But the mass of people in no country
wanted war. The Germans did not want it ; the Eng-
lish did not want it ; the Russians knew nothing about
it. Yet they all accepted it after it came ; and now
they give their lives gladly for their country. Oddly
enough the very fact that the present war was made
by governments rallies support to those governments,
and enlists the loyalty of the peoples. You can see in
your own nation how the paradox works. The French,
you say, generally scorned war, — C'est trop bete, la
guerre. Therefore when the war came they were
convinced that it was not of their own making. It
must be some one's fault. And whose but the enemy's?
It must have been the vile Germans, the contemptible
Boche, who brought this about. In war-time we com-
pletely forget the Biblical injunction about the beam
in our own eye.

Yet after all the French people must be held re-
sponsible for the actions of their government. Possibly
many of you did not realize where the alliance with
Russia and the policy of colonial expansion would

GERMANY MISJUDGED

ultimately lead you. You may have been hypnotized
by the banner of La Revanche and the call of La
Gloire. But you have a republican government; you
are a democracy. There has been in France for a
generation a strong war party. In the last decade
or two, through all the kaleidoscopic changes of your
politics, it has been apparent that this party of
"aggressive patriotism" was gaining strength, gather-
ing power. This effected the entente with England.
It engineered the adventure in Algeria, and later man-
aged the strangulation of Morocco. It maintained a
strong financial interest in the blood-stained conces-
sionaire system in the French and Belgian Congo. It
constantly worked to embitter Anglo-German relations,
— an effort ably abetted by the imperialist party in
Britain. It undermined every attempt to achieve a
reconciliation between France and Germany, and it
brought about the ruin of Caillaux. In other words,
the Colonial party, the Chauvinist party, was con-
tinuously successful in its designs. Although some of
the most patriotic and far-sighted statesmen in France
never ceased to combat it and the interests it repre-
sented, they were not able to break its grip. You had,
indeed, a popular test of its power just previous to the
outbreak of the war, in the elections on the Three
Year Law. The Three Year Law was sustained. The
militarists had won. The "New France," the France
of aggressive temper, of nationalistic bombast, had
been approved.

There was, I submit, a discernible downward trend

FRANCE

in the policies of the successive governments under
the Third RepubHc, and to some extent a decay in
French sentiment. There have been times when France
stood for liberty, equality and fraternity, and was
ready to make great sacrifices for unselfish ends. But
the France which battles to recover Alsace-Lorraine
and to enthrone the Russian Czar in Constantinople,
has drifted a long way from the ideals of the Revo-
lution; just as the England of Grey and Asquith is far
different from the England of Cobden, Bright and
Palmerston. Indeed this war could not have happened
had there not been a distinct deterioration in the tone
of European politics. All sentiment was squeezed out
of international relations, and along with it most of the
principle. One indication was the support given by
the Liberal West to the Russian bureaucracy, at a time
when that bureaucracy was menaced by Liberal revolt
at home. Another proof was the cynical abandonment
of the weaker nations and the colored races. Morocco,
the Congo, Finland, Persia, the Balkans! These out-
rages never would have been tolerated by any Euro-
pean civilization that was not preoccupied with selfish
and sinister plots and counterplots. Things are now
at such a pass that you are able to laud in the most
fulsome terms an Italy which bargains away its honor,
enters upon a career of national piracy, and attacks
its own allies in their hour of supreme peril. There
has been a debacle in morals.

This "New France" is the worst France since the
seventies, since the France of Paul Deroulede. You

GERMANY MISJUDGED

have revived that old lust for military glory which
France, through all her history, has never been able
quite to uproot. That is the heart of the matter. It
will not do to picture yourselves as the good white
knight forced to buckle on armor to meet the "Prus-
sian menace." The obvious historical facts disprove
the assertion. There has never been for you a Prus-
sian menace. In the last forty years you, a people
with a rapidly falling birth-rate and not essentially
commercial, entered on a policy of colonial expansion.
Germany, with more right, did the same thing. But
you succeeded in acquiring territory while she,
relatively, failed. But has she ever balked you in your
enterprises? Quite the contrary. The spurs of the
French chanticleer proved sharper and more annoying
than the beak of the German eagle. Remember
Morocco! In all those forty years the Mailed Fist
was not once lifted against you. It would not have
struck now had you not challenged the very existence
of Germany by the alliances with Russia and England.
What a masterly stroke of statecraft it was, this plac-
ing of Germany in a military vise ! Your leaders could
not resist that temptation. They saw a France re-
juvenated, reborn, triumphant! And the soul of the
French rose to the vision.

Well, you have the glory already, though not the
victory. No one of the Allies has made so splendid a
showing of military prowess and vigor. But at what
a cost in lives and human agony! No nation ever
bought its laurels more dearly. And who can tell

FRANCE

wliat sacrifices you may yet be called upon to make?
How idle it is, after all, to reproach the French! You
are intoxicated ; the madness is in your blood. It is
too late to turn back now ; you must see this through
to the bitter end. Yet the whole world grieves for you,
because the whole world loves you. It loves you not
for your ambitions or your bellicose moods, but for
the wholesome sanity of your life in times of peace,
for your gaiety and wit, because of your intellectual
and artistic brilliance, because you are, in a word, the
most Greek of modern nations. Americans especially
hold you dear, for they have not forgotten those flashes
of sympathy you have shown for the ideals which
America, in a blundering way, is trying to realize.
We see you now as the most pitiable figure in this
world war, because you suffer so much and w-ith the
least need. Our sympathy is not less because you
have, for the moment, turned your back on the great
ideals of human progress. You are like a beautiful
woman we have loved and who has betrayed our
loyalty, and we look on you and think, how can you
prove so false and be so fair. The fact that you suffer
for your own sins as well as for the sins of others only
makes the heartbreak heavier. Like France herself
we bow our heads to mourn your irrevocable dead and
unreturning brave.

THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA

AN able American historian predicted at the begin-
ning of this war that the United States would
be pro-German in its sympathies within four months.
He gave two reasons. The first was that the Ameri-
can mind would puncture the lid of lies which Euro-
pean diplomats had clamped over the explosion in
July, 1914, and would begin to understand the real
position in which Germany found herself. You see
he was a philosophical historian. His second reason
was that the German-Americans would argue the rest
of us around to their point of view.

It is superfluous to say that the historian was mis-
taken. Not four months, but four times four months,
have passed, and the United States is far from pro-
German. Our pro-Ally contingent, most conspicuous
in Boston and New York, is as violent as ever, both
in its opinions and the expression of them. There
exists, indeed, a very active and powerful element
which is working — covertly for the most part — to in-
volve the United States in a war with the Central
Powers. The German-Americans have not argued us
around. If they started out with such intention they
have failed. Their protestations may have had some
effect, but they themselves have been ridiculed, scolded,

TIIK ATTITUUI-: OF AMERICA

browbeaten, sneered at. To designate German-Amer-
icans, together with their friends the Irish-Americans
and the Austrian-Americans, a new term of reproach
has been invented, "hyphenates."

II
The German-Americans have been cruelly misrepre-
sented. There is no sounder or more desirable element
in our population than our Teutonic blood. There is
no element which has displayed devotion to the coun-
try, or civic or private virtue, in greater degree. Yet
in these months of war they have been forced into a
most distressing position. They have daily read in the
press the grossest insults to themselves and to the
land of their ancestors. They constantly see the news
poisoned by calumny and abuse. They live in a coun-
try which has declared its neutrality but which sup-
plies in tremendous quantities the arms and ammuni-
tion to kill their kin, and they are powerless to hinder.
When they have raised their voices in protest, their
patriotism has been questioned. It is impossible to
gauge the irritation, pain and humiliation they have
suffered. Nevertheless it has sometimes struck me as
odd that they have not made more headway against
American prejudice. For they have been almost the
sole champions of Germany's cause in America, and
they have had a strong logical case to argue. And yet
Americans, in the mass, have not been brought to see
the validity of Germany's major contentions.

For one thing, German-Americans have not always
been happy in their defense of Germany. They have

GERMANY MISJUDGED

sometimes used phrases to the detriment of facts. For
example, in seeking to combat American misconcep-
tions, some of them have asserted that Germany is
"democratic" and that Germans enjoy "personal lib-
erty." Now, to speak plainly, neither of these state-
ments is true except in a qualified measure. No gov-
ernment which maintains such rigid property qualifi-
cations on voting as does Prussia, and which gives
such large powers to a hereditary ruler, is democratic
in the Anglo-Saxon sense. People who live under such
a multitude of police regulations as do the Germans
have not personal liberty in the American sense. Ger-
man civilization shows many lofty virtues which other
peoples envy and have not attained ; but it is different
from ours. These things have nothing to do with the
case anyway. It is not our business to tell the Ger-
mans, who are free, enlightened, educated, what sort
of government they shall prefer, any more than it is
our business to tell the Chinese whether they shall
have a republic or a monarchy. Americans, after all,
are not so provincial as to want every nation cut from
the same pattern, — least of all their own pattern.

And also, there is Mr. Wilson !

German-Americans have been censured for attack-
ing President Wilson's foreign policy. This, of course,
is unjust. The very persons who objected when Ger-
man-Americans criticised the President for going too
far, are now belaboring the President for not going
far enough ! But have German-American criticisms
always been well directed? What, precisely, is the

THK ATTITUDK OF AMERICA

complaint tliey have to make against the administra-
tion's course?

In general, the accusation is this: that the United
States has been more neutral in name than in fact ;
that our neutrality has been highly prejudicial to Ger-
many and highly benevolent to the Allies. The citizens
of Germany and Austria, apparently, are convinced
of this; they do not think this country gives them a
square deal. Some Englishmen are candid enough to
admit the same thing. G. Bernard Shaw recently said :
"I may, however, remark, that America is not neutral.
She is taking a very active part in the war by supplying
us with ammunition and weapons and other munitions.
Neutrality is nonsense." Quite as emphatic is Norman
Angell : "Indeed, if we go below diplomatic fictions
to positive realities, America is decisively intervening
in the war; she is perhaps settling its issue by throw-
ing the weight of her resources in money, supplies and
ammunition on the side of one combatant against the
other. The American government has without doubt
scrupulously respected all the rules of neutrality. But
it would have been equally neutral for America to have
decided that her national interests compelled her to
exercise her sovereign rights in keeping her resources
at home at this juncture and to have treated combatants
exactly alike by exporting to neither. This form of
neutrality — just as legally defensible in the opinion of
many competent American judges as the present one —
would perhaps have altered the whole later history of
the war. I am not giving you my own opinion, but

GERMANY MISJUDGED

that of very responsible independent American authori-
ties, when I say that had American opinion been as
hostile to the Allies as on the whole it has been to
Germany, the campaign for an embargo on the export
of arms or the raising of a loan would have been
irresistible. You see I am speaking with undiplomatic
freedom ; saying out loud what everybody thinks."

The foregoing view, it seems to me, is unquestionably
sound. The United States supplies munitions to the
Allies not in normal quantities, but to the value of
billions of dollars. Our plants are run to their full
capacity ; extensions are built ; whole new factories are
erected. War orders dominate for the moment our
economic life. And all these supplies go to the enemies
of Germany. We cannot expect a German to be much
impressed by American preachments on "humanity"
and "justice" when his sons have been shot by Ameri-
can bullets. And what galls the native German almost
as much, I suspect, as the shipments of arms, which he
knows to be technically legal, is the supine attitude of
America toward Great Britain. We are not holding
the balance even. British violations of neutral rights^
are, from the standpoint of international law, more
reprehensible than Germany's submarine warfare,
which was a policy of reprisal. Britain has killed our
trade with Germany in noncontraband goods, although
not maintaining even the semblance of a blockade of
German ports ; she has forbidden our trade with even

'See Economic Aspects of the War by Edwin T. Clapp, New Haven,
1915.

THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA

neutral countries of Europe (while actively trading
with those countries herself) ; she has stopped Ameri-
can vessels and taken off citizens ; she has seized the
mails of the United States. These arrogant violations
of our rights are not merely technical ; they are calcu-
lated to do the greatest possible amount of harm to the
Central Powers; they were initiated frankly for the
double purpose of starving Germany's population, and
of effecting Germany's economic ruin. Neutrals be
hanged; Britannia rules the waves!

What has the United States done to stop these
wrongs? Obviously, nothing effective. Each new
"blockade" order is more offensive than the last. It is
illuminating to contrast the mild and polite protests of
this government to England with the sharp, menacing
language used to Germany. Whenever we have ad-
dressed ourselves to England or France we have said
in effect: "My dear fellow, can't you see that you are
in the wrong?" Whenever we have addressed our-
selves to Germany or Austria we have said in effect:
"You contemptible ruffian, quit that instantly!" We
have used threats with Germany, persuasion wnth Eng-
land. The result is that Germany has granted our de-
mands, while England has grown more arrogant.

The United States, in order to make its neutrality
one of fact and not of pretensions, must do one or the
other of two things : must place an embargo on the
export of arms, or break the British blockade. Per-
haps the latter alternative is the more feasible. Un-
questionably an embargo on munitions should have

GERMANY MISJUDGED

been undertaken at the beginning of the war, for both
neutral and humanitarian reasons. But now, a year
and a half later, it is possibly too late. Yet this swol-
len industry and these tremendous shipments of the
instruments of death cannot be ignored. They over-
shadow every other relation of America to the strug-
gle. They constitute us in fact an ally of the Allies.
If they may not now be stopped, they lay on us the
sternest obligation to make England toe the mark.
That can be done ; a serious threat of an embargo
would help the British lion to see a gleam of reason.
And unless we do this we may entirely forfeit the re-
spect and friendship of the Central Powers, — a
friendship we can ill afford to lose.

German-Americans, it seems to me, have wasted too
much verbal shot and shell on President Wilson. After
all Mr. Wilson has kept us out of the fray. It is not
hard to think of other prominent Americans who, in
his place, would have embroiled us long ago! There
are many of us who do not like Mr. Wilson's diplo-
matic methods ; they verge too much on a policy of
drift. But we prefer them to bellicose methods. The
power of the President, moreover, has its limits. Con-
gress has the authority to place an embargo on the
export of arms ; the Senate has the final word in for-
eign relations. German-Americans should work
toward two ends, I think, — first, to make our neutral-
ity genuine and impartial, and second and more im-
portant, to keep America out of the war. That danger
has by no means passed. To accomplish these ends

THE ATTITUOI-: OF AMERICA

they should concentrate on American opinion, try to
squeeze out of it unfairness, rancor and intolerance.
Already they liave accomplished something in this
direction. The tone of American opinion has im-
proved since the start of the war. But there still
remains much ground to be plowed.

Ill

The people of the United States have escaped the
war fever, although persistent attempts are made to
arouse them to a fighting mood. Beyond cavil the
citizens of this country are bent on peace.

Rudyard Kipling, whose occupation these days is
to out-Junker the Junkers, has proposed the pleasant
little toast: "Damn all neutrals!" Undoubtedly Mr.
Kipling cocked a baleful eye at the United States when
he uttered this. We could afford to smile at Mr. Kip-
ling's spleen if he stood alone. But within the last
year many militant non-combatants among the Allies
have cast baleful glances at the United States. The
indifference of America offends them as deeply, ap-
parently, as the hatred of their enemy. Why, they
ask with a gesture of impatience, should Americans
stand aside in this crisis of a civilization ? \\niy should
they allow others to fight their battle for them — the
battle of liberty and democracy? And these critics
of ours in England and France are none too delicate
in attributing motives for this Yankee apathy toward
their noble cause. They insinuate we are too busy
making dollars out of others' distress to heed the call

GERMANY MISJUDGED

of the spirit, and they frankly hint that when we say
we are too proud to fight we mean too cowardly.

A number of Britons have recently unburdened
themselves on this subject of American neutrality.^
Let me quote a few of the choicer passages :

"We fight not merely for our threatened selves; we
fight for the liberty and peace of the whole world. We
fight, and you Americans know we fight, for you. War
is a tragic and terrible business, and those who will
not face the blood and dust of it must be content to
play only the most secondary of parts in the day of
reckoning. H. G. Wells."

"On the last question, however, — the future of
America in face of a German triumph — I can speak,
if not with authority, at least with certainty. There
is simply no doubt in the world that a German pow-er
founded on the breaking of France and England would
have ultimately to break America, too, before its work
was secure. A rich and disdainful democracy across
the Atlantic is something which the German Empire
simply could not afiford to tolerate. If Germany gets
as far as that, it would be vain to discuss whether
America should fight, because America certainly will;
and in that fight, please God, she would have Burgoyne
beside her as well as Lafayette.

G. K. Chesterton."

"The British nation would certainly be much grati-
fied if their kinsmen, the Americans, should take a

"Everybody's Magazine, January, 1916.

THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA

hand in suppressing the 'mad bull of Europe.' Eng-
land would certainly be greatly benefited if America
should go to war with Germany. Sir Roper Parking-
ton, M. P., in a recent speech, said: 'If the Amer-
icans should join the Allies, the war would soon be
ended.' Sir Hiram Maxim."

"Personally. I have always held that America would
come to England's assistance if ever England was
hard pressed. Great Britain as yet is not, thank God,
in a hole. Still, it has puzzled me not a little during
the past year to assign a good cause for America re-
maining neutral in this awful contest. Is not America,
just as much as Great Britain, a lover of justice and
a hater of such atrocities as those which have char-
acterized the warfare of the Huns? And as a friend
she can no longer stand aloof and see civilization, and
all that great nations are bound to uphold and hold
dear, crushed and trampled under foot by barbarism
and 'f rightfulness.' I am quite convinced that it is
the unanimous opinion throughout Great Britain that
America should join the Allies, and it is undoubtedly
a fixed hope in this country that she will assuredly
do so before many months have passed.

General Garnet Wolseley."

These gentlemen take their malice and themselves
very seriously. But they have, as it seems to me,
totally misjudged the trend of American opinion since
the outbreak of hostilities. They do not see that
Americans — outside of the Anglomaniacs, found

GERMANY MISJUDGED

chiefly along the Atlantic seaboard — passionately de-
sire peace because they have come to believe that peace
serves not only the best interests of themselves but of
civilization itself. The Middle West, the West, and
the South, do not want war, will not have war. Even
in the hypnotized East there is a great sober element
which would regard a plunge into this welter of slaugh-
ter as the worst possible calamity to the Republic.
Only the pro-Ally fanatics (who are the most dan-
gerous hyphenates we harbor, as I shall attempt to
point out in a moment) want war and work for war.
Americans, in other words, have traveled far from
that naive partisanship for the Allies which charac-
terized them eighteen months ago. What has wrought
this change in sentiment? Chiefly the growth of a
healthy cynicism. I am speaking now of the bulk of
Americans, who lie in opinion between the red-hot
pro-Germans on the one extreme and the red-hot pro-
Ally sympathizers on the other extreme. This great
sane mass of the nation has disallowed the high-
sounding declarations, the grandiose pretentions, of
either side. It has come to some very definite con-
clusions ; it believes that this war was willed by gov-
ernments, not by peoples ; that it sprang directly from
a system of diplomatic groups and military alliances,
each of which was trying constantly to tilt or upset
the balance of power in its own favor; that the only
significant rivalries behind the mutual hostilities were
imperialistic rivalries ; that the real stakes in this war
are colonies, trade pre-emptions, strategic ports and

THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA

straits, and above all, military prestige; that militarism
may be indicated by a predominant navy as well as by
a great army, and that its essence is neither, but an itch
for power and a muddle of selfish national ambitions;
that militarism is not exclusively or even principally
a Prussian disease, but a European, indeed, a world
disease ; that despite all the fine phrases about free-
dom, justice and democracy, the real danger to civiliza-
tion lies in the war itself and in its spread : that a war
of imperialistic rivalries enlists the support of great
populations by cant and by lies about the enemy ; and
that as the struggle grows in bitterness and in extent
of bereavement, both sides — but especially the losing
side — become fanatic in hatred of the foe.

In brief, Americans refuse to be impressed longer
by sham and pose. They are inclined to agree with
Francis Delaisi, who predicted in 1911 that the busi-
ness magnates and the politicians were about to plunge
Europe into an imperialistic struggle.^ They are in-
clined to agree with Bernard Shaw, who asserted early
in the conflict: "All attempts to represent this war as
anything higher or more significant philosophically or
politically or religiously for our Junkers and our
Tommies than a (juite primitive contest of the pug-
nacity that bullies and the pugnacity that will not be
bullied are foredoomed to the derision of history."
Bryan voiced American sentiment when he called it a
"causeless war." Of course the phrase is inaccurate ;

'The Inevitable War (La guerre qui tient), by Francis Dtlaisi. Paris,
1911; Boston, 1915.

GERMANY MISJUDGED

there were causes enough, such as they were. Rather
it should be called a witless war.

Another reason why most Americans cannot share
the views of the solemn Englishmen above quoted is
that Americans have not given way to hatred of Ger-
mans. We regard them as human beings much like
other men and women, not as "Huns," "savages" and
"beasts." The American does not have the Briton's
naive belief in German atrocities. He knows that
many of these tales (such as that of the Belgian child
with severed hands) have been disproved a hundred
times. He hears quite as frightful reports of Rus-
sian atrocities and of French outrages. He under-
stands that war is a gruesome business and that it
brings out some of the basest traits in human nature;
but he is unwilling to heap all the abuse due to human
nature at its worst on Teutonic nature. Not only does
the American show a wholesome skepticism toward
the atrocity yarns paraded by the Allied govern-
ments ; he goes further ; he feels a revulsion of disgust.
He wonders why men who are gentlemen attack the
reputations as well as the soldiers of their foes, and
keep up a campaign of calumniation which they know
in part at least to be false, a campaign at once mali-
cious and mendacious.

Still another reason why the American feels kindlier
toward Germany is that he has a high respect for
German civilization, in times of peace at any rate.
The British upper classes seem always to have re-
garded Germans with the contempt that the estab-

THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA

lished feel toward the nouvcau richc. They are unap-
preciative of German poetry, art and literature ; they
speak of boors and canaille ; they appear to have gath-
ered their estimate of the German nation by watching
a fat Berliner eat sauerkraut in a beer-garden. The
American on the other hand gives German civiliza-
tion its due, even though he be one who deplores its
"militarism." He knows that German music and Ger-
man science lead the world ; he admires the Germans
for their educational system, for their municipalities,
for their social insurance. Englishmen have often
commented on the paucity of learning in America, and
compared our culture unfavorably with their own ;
and perhaps in general the boast is justified. But in
their ignorance of the real Germany and of German
cultural attainments the English upper classes have
shown tiiemselves to be precisely what Matthew Arnold
called them — "barbarians."

Our British critics should remember that Americans
are fully competent to judge for themselves what the
effect of a German victory would be on the United
States. \\t are not affrighted over hypothetical Ger-
man schemes. We know perfectly well that a German
victory would not lead to the "enslavement" of either
England or of France, and we are not worried about
the fate of Suez or of India. We do not forget, again,
that a German defeat means not only the triumph of
British imperialism, but the triumph of Russia and
Japan. We would rather see the Balkan peoples, or
the races of the Near East, Prussianized than Russian-

GERMANY MISJUDGED

ized. And most vividly of all, Americans realize that
the trend of world politics after the v^^ar is a matter
of sheer speculation. It is all guesswork; no one
knows. The dread designs which the British attribute
to the German government are deduced from enmity
and malice, not from reason or clearheaded calcula-
tion. America's answer to all this alarmist talk is mili-
tary and naval preparedness ; we shall be ready to meet
aggression, from whatever quarter! So far as South
America is concerned. Englishmen would do well to
ponder a bit the pregnant remark of Israel Zangwill :
"But the Monroe Doctrine would lose its last vestige
of meaning if America intervened in a European
war."

The American people have come to the conclusion
that peace is their duty. This is not from fear, greed
or sluggishness. We are not ultra-pacifists in this
country ; we do not want peace at any price, especially
at the price of honor. But that is just the point: we
are not convinced that any great moral principle, or
even any fundamental issue of nationality, is at stake
in this conflict. As the strife in Europe grows more
desperate, as the non-combatant populations show a
more revengeful and hateful temper, the war seems
more and more remote (except to the Anglomaniacs)
from American interests. After all, why should Amer-
ica feed her sons to this carnage by the thousands, or
the hundreds of thousands? Why should boys from
the farms of Ohio, Kansas and Texas die to help
France take Alsace-Lorraine, or the Romanoffs to vic-

THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA

timize more peoples ? What have we to gain by becom-
ing, for the first time in our history, entangled in mur-
derous European rivalries? Why should we abandon
our one opportunity of service, that, as President Wil-
son has expressed it, of keeping the "processes of
peace alive, if only to prevent collective economic
ruin"?

At the start the mass of Americans felt both an
intense loyalty to the cause of the Allies, and a grip-
ping horror at the catastrophe to Europe. Both of
these feelings have to some extent weakened. The
intellectual classes are not now so much concerned
over the military outcome as over the prospective
terms of settlement. They hope that both sides will
act with a measure of magnanimity and restraint which
will give some basis for a permanent peace. By the
common man, by the man in the street, the war is
now regarded with indifference, indeed, with bore-
dom. Our vast American irreverence has asserted
itself, even in the face of the most awful battle of
history. In many places "war talk" is tabooed, con-
sidered bad form. The majority of Americans, prob-
ably, still hope to see the Allies win ; but their interest
is sentimental rather than vital. It is not the breathless
solicitude of one who watches his champion do battle
to save him ; it is rather the enthusiasm of the baseball
"fan" who cheers for the home team. At the begin-
ning of the war the favorite American quip was:
"I'm neutral; I don't care who beats Germany." At
present Americans are so neutral they are reconciled

GERMANY MISJUDGED

to the prospect of seeing Germany win, if she can
muster the strength. This growth of indifference may
gall Englishmen, Frenchmen and American Tories.
But it is, I submit, a patent fact.

There is a conspicuous element in America which
has persistently refused to see this war through Amer-
ican eyes. When these persons look at contemporary
history they look at it from the point of view of Eng-
lishmen and Frenchmen ; when they urge action they
urge it in the interest of the European coalition to
which England and France belong. They are our pro-
Ally fanatics, our Anglomaniacs, our American Tories.
By whatever name they may be called, they have one
distinguishing mark: they make mock of our neutral-
ity.

August 18, 1914, before the war was a month old,
President Wilson issued an appeal for restraint in
discussing the conflict. The President said in part:

"The effect of the war upon the United States will
depend upon what American citizens say or do. Every
man who really loves America will act and speak in
the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of
impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all con-
cerned.

"The people of the United States are drawn from
many nations, and chiefly from the nations now at
war. It is natural and inevitable that there should be
the utmost variety of sympathy and desire among them

THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA

with regard to the issues and circumstances of the
conflict. Some will wish one nation, others another,
to succeed in this momentous struggle. It will be easy
to excite passion and difficult to allay it. Those
responsible for exciting it will assume a heavy respon-
sibility.

"I venture, therefore, my countrymen, to speak a
solemn word of warning against that deepest, most
subtle, most essential breach of neutrality which may
spring out of partisanship, out of passionately taking
sides.

"I am speaking, I feel sure, the earnest wish and
purpose of every thoughtful American that this great
country of ours, which is, of course, the first in our
thoughts and hearts, should show herself in this tone
of peculiar trial a nation fit beyond others to exhibit
the fine poise of undisturbed judgment, the dignity of
self-control, the efficiency of dispassionate action, a
nation which neither sits in judgment upon others nor
is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps her-
self fit and free to do what is honest and disinter-
ested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world."

From the beginning pro-Ally sympathizers have
spit upon the President's words. They have passion-
ately taken sides. They have put no bridle on their
tongues ; they have poured out the vilest vituperation
on Germany. With asinine self-complacency they
have "sat in judgment" on the nations at war, and
delivered the "American verdict." Although finding
themselves largely in control of the press, they have

GERMANY MISJUDGED

never tried to speak impartially, never attempted to
allay passion. On the contrary, they have done their
embittered best to lash America to intolerance and
hysteria.

Since the torpedoing of the Lusitania this unneutral
element has tried to rush us into war over our "rights."
And this despite the fact that there never has been the
slightest excuse for going to war over that issue. On
the whole, neither side has offered us direct offense.
We have simply been caught between the firing lines.
It is impossible to vindicate neutral rights by fighting
one side, for both sides have infringed those rights.
Should we war on Germany we should fight by the
side of allies whose interpretation of sea law is no more
acceptable to us than that of our foes. Indeed, a sea
monopolized and fortified by Great Britain may in
the end prove more disturbing to us than the subma-
rine indiscretions of Germany and Austria.

Of course pro-Ally sympathizers insist that Ger-
many's invasion of neutral rights have cost American
lives, whereas England's violations result in merely
commercial and economic damage. The distinction
is hypocritical. The persons who work themselves
into a rage over Germany's "slaughter of innocent
women and children" are not in the least annoyed be-
cause German babies are going to die for lack of
milk. England's violations of our rights have been
less spectacular than Germany's ; but they are far more
insolent. And it is well to remember that the Fathers
fought the Revolution over a stamp-tax. The present

THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA

administration has vindicated the right of Americans
to sail through war zones on ships of beUigerent na-
tions (although in Mexico it warned Americans to
leave or remain at their own risk). But it has not
vindicated the right of Americans to use the high seas
for legitimate commerce. Senator Gore summed up
the matter in a sentence: "It is quite as important to
protect the right of Americans to ship innocent goods
as it is to protect their right to risk involving this
country in a carnival of slaughter."

The submarine controversy has dragged itself out
month after month. At each halt in the negotiations
our traitorous Anglomaniacs have rejoiced. They have
implored the President to stickle for every little point
of international law. They have insisted on a policy
designed, not to vindicate our rights, but to sever rela-
tions. They are insatiate ; no concession satisfies them.
Germany declares that she has no intention of molest-
ing neutral ships and neutral commerce; then she
yields unconditionally to the demand that unarmed
merchantmen, under hostile flag, must not be torpedoed
without warning and without adequate provision for
the safety of passengers and crew. Does this impair-
ment of the submarine w-eapon placate the Anglo-
maniacs ? Not at all ; they now insist that Germany and
Austria must forbear to treat armed merchantmen as
auxiliary cruisers. It is not enough that Americans
may travel safely on American, Dutch and Scandi-
navian ships ; not enough that they may travel without
fear on unarmed British, French, Italian and Japanese

GERMANY MISJUDGED

ships. They must also be granted the right to travel
without danger on belligerent vessels carrying arma-
ment hypocritically called "defensive." Sensible
Americans, in and out of Congress, rightly urge that
American citizens be warned to stay off armed bel-
ligerent vessels. But our frenzied Tories scream that
American honor is at stake. Honor? Great Britain
during the Russo-Japanese war, and Sweden during
the present war, warned their citizens not to travel on
armed belligerent ships save at their own risk. Did
England and Sweden thereby lose their national honor?
In her attitude toward so-called defensive armament,
Germany has the equity on her side, whatever the let-
ter of the law may be. This is a trifling "right" for
us to cherish ; and to endanger our peace for it would
be childish. Its defense can seem important only to
those whose minds hold a hinterland of anti-German
hate.

In the name of honesty, what more can these Ameri-
ican Tories demand of the United States? Has our
neutrality been interpreted in any way which has
given aid or succor to the Teutonic Powers? Have
we not by our huge shipments of arms virtually con-
stituted ourselves an ally of the Entente ? The unvar-
nished truth is this : the pro-Ally fanatics in this coun-
try are not thinking of American interests at all ; they
are thinking of British and French interests. They
ask us to intervene in a European struggle because of
their opinion of the European right and wrong of it.
They want us to go to war despite the fact that our

100

THE ATTITL'DE OF AMERICA

youth would be killed and our wealth destroyed in
a quarrel which is no concern of the American people.
They demand war notwithstanding that it would im-
peril our international relations for a century. They
urge us to fight, knowing full well that in our opin-
ions we are a divided people, and that war would blast
our national unity and run a cleavage of rancor and
hatred through our cosmopolitan population.

These Anglomaniacs usually disguise their intentions
in a fog of fine words. Sometimes they are more can-
did. In New York City there is an organization de-
nominating itself The American Rights Committee.
This committee has issued a statement which reads :

"Seventeen months of the European war have
passed. During this period events of profound sig-
nificance have occurred and issues formerly obscure
have become clearly defined. The brutal violation of
Belgian neutrality has been followed by the bombard-
ment of unfortified places, the deliberate killing of
non-combatants, the murder of women and children
on land and sea, the wholesale massacre of the Ar-
menian people, the disclosure of gigantic purposes of
world-conquest, and a general defense of these un-
speakable deeds by the Teutonic peoples.

"Our eyes have been opened to facts which were
not fully revealed when we adopted a policy of neu-
trality, and the situation which confronts us today is
not that which confronted us in August, 1914. Then
we were admonished to remain neutral toward the
European crisis: today we are involved in a world-

101

GERMANY MISJUDGED

crisis. Then we followed the traditional American
policy of non-interference in European political strug-
gles: today we are called upon to champion the im-
mutable and universal rights of man. Then we tried
to maintain neutrality of thought as well as of word
and deed : today the Teutonic Allies have forced upon
us issues which render neutrality not merely impossible
but utterly repugnant to the moral conscience of the
nation. Through our fuller knowledge of the events
which precipitated the war, of the manner in which
it has been prosecuted by the Teutonic Allies, and of
the enormous schemes for Teutonic aggrandizement,
we have come to understand that a theory and method
of government which we abhor is being forced upon
the world by military might, and that all those human
liberties which our nation was founded to maintain
are today imperiled by the possibility of a Teutonic
triumph."

This bombast is followed by a "declaration of prin-
ciples" :

"1. We believe that there is a morality of nations
which requires every government to observe its treaty-
obligations and to order its conduct with a decent
respect to the opinions of mankind.

"2. We believe that the Teutonic Powers have re-
pudiated the obligations of civilized nations and have
raised issues which lift the present struggle from
the sphere of European political disputes to a crisis
involving all humanity.

"3. We believe that in the face of such a world-

102

THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA

crisis our people cannot remain neutral and our gov-
ernment should not remain silent.

"4. We condemn the aims of the Teutonic Powers,
and we denounce as barbarous their methods of war-
fare.

"5. We believe that the Entente Allies are engaged
in a struggle to prevent the domination of the world
by armed force and are striving to guarantee to the
smallest nation its rights to an independent and peace-
ful existence,

"6. We believe that the progress of civilization and
the free development of the principles of democratic
government depend upon the success of the Entente
Allies.

"7. We believe that our duty to humanity and
respect for our national honor demand that our gov-
ernment take appropriate action to place the nation
on record as deeply in sympathy with the efforts of
the Entente Allies to remove the menace of Prussian
militarism."

It would be a waste of time to refute these state-
ments. They obviously are inspired by prejudice and
ill-will ; they obviously treat the crassest assumptions
as matters of fact ; they obviously reveal a sophomoric
conception of international politics. Nevertheless these
agitators and their ilk constitute a menace to the peace
and security of the United States. Preposterous as
their utterances are, they foster malevolence, for in
times of passion declamation passes for reason. These
Anglomaniacs are turning their backs on America;

103

GERMANY MISJUDGED

they have their eyes fastened on England, Belgium
and France. They do not heed American opinion ; they
listen to the advice of Englishmen. They are our true
hyphenates. They are the real traitors within our
borders. They are the unloyal element that has intro-
duced "corrupt distempers" into our national life.

For these American Tories there is only one ade-
quate piece of advice : Let them get out ! Let them
enlist and take their places in the English trenches.
Let them remember that the seas are open to them;
Brittania rules the waves ! Their hearts are in France
and England ; they are free to prove their sincerity
by risking their lives there. We do not want them in
America, fighting the war with their mouths, seeking
to embroil the whole nation. I am aware that this
advice cannot be followed by many of our most violent
pro-Ally fanatics, because they are past military age.
It is a remarkable fact that our bitterest defamers of
Germany are old men. I shall not be invidious enough
to mention names; but just recall to mind the leading
American Tories ! There is no more shameful spec-
tacle in America than these malignant old men, waving
their fists at the Kaiser, mouthing the garbage thrown
to them from Fleet Street, hounding us on, shrilling
for a sacrifice of American blood.

Most thinking men and women agree that this is a
time for America to keep her head and watch her step.
Should the Teutonic armies continue their victories,

104

THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA

and approach to a triumph, the efforts of hyphenated
Anglo- and Franco-Americans to involve us will be-
come more frantic. But that collective insanity we
shall probable avoid, despite their fomentations. We
shall do the world the negative service of standing
aloof. But it seems doubtful that America will be
able to accomplish anything positive for world peace,
anything constructive for the future security of
mankind.

And the reason?

Simply this : that bigotry cannot reform bigots ; that
prejudice and hatred and intolerance cannot heal a
world gone mad with hatred and intolerance. Amer-
ica cannot effectively fight militarism so long as she
thinks injustice to Germany. And let there be no
mistake about that: American opinion is monstrously
unjust. It is as unjust to Germany now as was British
opinion to the North during our Civil War. America
cannot suggest sensible remedies for war so long
as she holds to the childish notion that the blood-guilt
of this greatest of all wars is a personal guilt of the
German military caste or of the German people.

Fundamentally, of course, none of the great govern-
ments at war is blameless. We do not have here white
angels fighting black fiends, but human beings all
smeared with the same scarlet. The only question
open to debate is, who is smeared the less? This ques-
tion finds its answer in the recent politics of Europe,
the history, say, of the ten years preceding the war.
To me it seems that any philosophical examination of

105

GERMANY MISJUDGED

this recent history gives Germany a shade of advan-
tage, a sliglitly superior claim on our moral sympathy,
both for the character of her aims, and her honesty
in avowing them.

American comment on the war appears either to
have overshot the mark, or undershot it. It has been
either too naive or too subtle. First of all, Americans
made up their minds that Germany commenced the
war ; that she was the "disturber of the world's peace."
It was a snap judgment, for it was based almost exclu-
sively upon the events of the twelve days of the crisis.
The diplomatic documents of the European govern-
ments were said to embody the "evidence in the case."
Never was evidence flimsier. The different govern-
ments wrote, selected and printed what they wanted the
world to read. The dispatches are all scissors and
paste, and sometimes not even that, but plain fabrica-
tion, as in the instance of the notorious No. 2 in the
French Yellow Book. The worthlessness of such
"evidence" for unbiased judgment is shown by the
fact that men come to exactly opposite conclusions
in reading it. Judgment depends not on what the dis-
patches say, but on which of them one believes true,
and which one rejects as false. From a thorough pe-
rusal of the White, Yellow, Orange, Gray, Blue, Red
and Green Books, every person emerges with precisely
that mental colorblindness with which he started.

Americans condemned Germany at the beginning
mainly from newspaper accounts of the crisis. That
snap judgment has never been revised. The scholarly

106

THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA

portion of American opinion has busied itself chiefly
in explaining what it assumed to be true. It has started
from the premise that the Teutons precipitated a
world war, and were bitten with militarism. So it has
attempted to give reasons for that militarism. It has
sought to trace the influence of Nietzsche and Treit-
schke on the Teutonic consciousness ; it has attempted
to derive German psychology from Kant ; it has made
elaborate and academic contrasts between the Latin
and Teutonic civilizations, — and so on through fine-
spun dialectics. All of this discussion is but window-
dressing for a theory and a prejudice.

Some thoughtful Americans, who see the war as a
logical result of the silent, alert struggle in Europe
between rival alliances for a balance of power, cover-
ing many years, state a conclusion unfavorable to
Germany in restrained language. They would agree
with Prof. Ellery C. Stowell : "I do not wish to be
understood as thinking that Germany really wished
for war ; but by her conduct she gave evidence that
she intended to back up her ally to secure a diplo-
matic triumph and the subjugation of her neighbor,
which would have greatly strengthened Teutonic influ-
ence in the Balkans. She risked the peace of Europe
in a campaign after prestige." With such moderation
it is hard to quarrel. But most pro-Ally Americans
are not content to maintain that Germany was sixty
per cent wrong in the diplomacy directly preceding the
war; they assert she was ninety-eight per cent wrong,
or one hundred per cent wrong. According to these

107

GERMANY MISJUDGED

uncompromising partisans she plotted a war, conspired
for it, deliberately provoked it.

To support the charge of conspiracy the pro-Ally
fanatics surely cite the well-known facts. They un-
doubtedly point out that at the end of July, 1914,
Germany had not recalled her reserves from any part
of the world, that the Kaiser was yachting in the
North Sea, that the harvests were not in, that the
German fleet was scattered in small units on all the
oceans. To demonstrate that the Entente Allies were
innocently ignorant of the impending crash they prob-
ably call attention to the mobilization measures taken
in Russia as early as June, to the timely review of
the English fleet in the early summer, to the trans-
portation of colonial troops to France several weeks
before the ultimatums. They unquestionably go fur-
ther. They show that England was unprepared for
the conflict because she had been maintaining the two-
power naval standard ; France because she practised
conscription and had recently passed the Three Year
Law: Russia because the number of her armies and
reserves was equal to those of Germany and Austria
combined. Germany, they say, has been pursuing
for a long time a selfish imperialistic policy; she has
been seeking colonies and trying to guarantee markets
for her export products. But the Allies on the other
hand have pursued a relatively altruistic policy; they
have stood for the status quo; they guard the rights
of small nations. This disinterestedness of the Allies
is demonstrated by their acquiring, previous to war,

106

THE ATT1TUD1-: OF AMERICA

several times as much territory as Germany ; by their
treatment of Morocco, Finland and Persia ; by their
penetrations of Arabia and China. All of these argu-
ments lead up to the conclusion that Germany is the
one militaristic nation, and that her ambitions plunged
a guileless world in strife. Exactly what we started
out to prove !

But after all the warm partisan of the Allies does
not reason about causes, — he feels. His emotions are
dominant. Having determined that Germany is to
blame for the war, he judges every subsequent issue
unfairly. Atrocity tales from the Entente side stir
his anger, whereas atrocity tales from the German
side, even when better bolstered by proof, fail to move
his imagination. He would demand that the United
States protest the violation of Belgium's neutrality ;
but he would consider it silly to protest the violation of
Greece's neutrality. It should be apparent to every
thinking man that the Belgian affair must of necessity
seem more reprehensible to the pro-Ally sympathizer
than to the sympathizer with the Teutonic Powers.
The latter cannot help but feel that Germany's extreme
peril justified the passage of troops across neutral
territory, and that Belgium, by her secret agreements
with France and England, by her French sympathies,
and by the fact and character of her resistance, con-
stituted herself virtually one of the Allies. Whether
this view is right or wrong, the fact remains that had
the United States protested the invasion of Belgium
she would not have been acting merely in the interests

109

GERMANY MISJUDGED

of international law ; she would have been "sitting in
judgment" on the war, she would have been taking
sides. In any event it is not the business of the United
States, where American rights are not invaded, to
play the part of international Pharisee and send out
protests every time any one does anything we deem
"lawless" or "unrighteous." If we adopted that policy
we should be shooting out protests every week. What
tribunal appointed us the judge of nations and their
acts?

This is a time pre-eminently for charity, forbearance,
friendliness to all. It is not a time for imputing bad
motives, for recriminations. The war is the logical
result of imperialism, of rival military alliances, of
the doctrine of the balance of power. The dominant
cliques of Europe thought a war inevitable. It has for
decades been the business of these cliques to plot,
not for war, not for peace, but for successful war.
Possibly both sides thought the hour had struck in
1914, the Germans for strategic reasons, the Entente
for political reasons. Unquestionably the statesmen
of the Entente believed at the beginning they would
soon crush Germany and Austria, that the 300,000,000
would soon overwhelm the 130,000,000. Their coali-
tion once set in motion, they predicted a short victo-
rious war. In this they simply misjudged, they under-
estimated Germany's strength and resources. I can-
not believe there was much sinister calculation for the
precise event on either side, except possibly by the
autocracy and military caste of Russia. On the whole,

110

THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA

Europe simply tumbled into war. The nations had
erected rivalries and enmities which could not stand
the strain of a real crisis.

If America wishes to accomplish aught for peace
within the next year, the next decade or next quarter
century, it must face the real situation. It must grap-
ple, intellectually, with an evil system, with an inter-
national problem. Surely Europe is not training itself
to solve the problem. So far as causes are concerned,
this war was not a people's war. But today it has
become precisely that. Hate has eaten into the vitals
of every nation. To each people the wickedness of
their foe seems the one great curse upon mankind.
Blood-lust and revenge are re-enforced by moral pur-
poses. The spirit of the Inquisition is being revived.
It hardly seemed possible ; but one can see the re-crea-
tion of that hell of human motives in England and
France — the idea of saving the soul by torturing the
body, — of redeeming a nation by killing its citizens.
Possibly Europe will recover from that insanity. Cer-
tainly America cannot help Europe by capitulating to
the same madness. Only by the exercise of dispassion-
ate judgment and an infinite compassion can we offer
the world a new horizon and a hope.

Ill

INDEX

Algeciras, Conference at, 49, 51,

52.
Alsace-Lorraine, 73, 74, 77.
America, and international peace,

8, 87-96, 105, 111.
American hostility to Germany,

reasons for, 18-20, 106-109.
American injustice to Germany, 37,

38, 83-85, 105, 106.
American Rights Committee, quot-
ed, 101-103.
American trade in munitions of

war, 41, 83-86.
Angell, Norman, quoted, 83.
Anglo-German rivalry, folly of, 44,

57, 64.
Anglomaniacs, American, 96-104.
Anti-German cabal in England, 53,
Antwerp, 32, 48.
Arnold, Matthew, 93.
Astonishment of Americans at the

war, 21.
Atrocities, alleged German, 33-36,

92.
Atrocities, Russian, 34.

Balkans, 23, 25, 55. 67, 77, 93, 107.
Belgium, invasion of, 27-33, 45-49,

109.
Bennett, Arnold, 56.

Bismark, 61, 74.

British "blockade," 84, 85.

British misunderstanding of Ger-
many, 57-60, 92, 93.

British White Book, quoted, 46.

Bryan, W. J., 91.

Bryce, Viscount, 33.

Causes of the war, 24, 25, 53, 61,
62, 90, 105, 107, 110.

Censorships, contrasted, 59.

Chesterton, G. K., quoted, 88.

Civilization, German, 59, 92, 93.

Clutton-Brock, A., quoted, 16.

Colonies, German lack of, 63, 78.

Colored troops, used by Allies, 35,
36.

Congo, 52, 76, IT.

Cramb, Professor, quoted, 61.

"Defensive", France on the, 55,

68-71.
Delaisi, Francis, 91.
"Democracy", in Germany, 40, 82.
Dernberg, 19.
Dickinson, G. Lowes, quoted, 8,

23, 55, 67.
Dum-dum bullets, 35.

England, misjudgment of Germany,
57-60, 92, 93; relations with Bel-
gium, 45-49; relations with

INDEX

France, 49-55; relations with
Russia, 55-57; attitude toward
America, 87-89, 84.

Entente Cordiale, 50, 54, 76.

Essen, 31.

Finland, 23, 57, 77.

France, spirit of, 66, 78, 79; "at-
tacked", 27, 68-75; entente with
England, 49, 50, 54; alliance
with Russia, 67, 72; colonial
party in, 54, 76.

French Yellow Book, 106, quoted,
69.

Franco-Prussian War, 1870, 73.

Franco-Russian Alliance, 55, 67-73.

German-Americans, 19, 80-86.
German civilization, 59, 92, 93.
German preparedness, 24, 38, 39,

108.
German victory, possible results of,

40, 93, 94.
German White Paper, quoted, 26.
Gore, Senator, quoted, 99.
Great Britain, see England.
Grey, Sir Edward, 29, 45, 46, 50,

52, 53, 77.

Hague Conventions, 35, 41.
"Huns", Germans as, 33, 36, 57,
89, 92.

Injustice, American to Germany,
37, 38, 83-85, 105, 106.

International Law, violations of,
35, 84, 98.

Ireland, 49.

Italy, 77.

Kipling, Rudyard, 87.
Kropotkin, Prince, 56.

"Le Martin, 52.

Le Temps, 52.

Loans to Russian Bureaucracy, 54,

73, 77.
Lusitania, 19, 98.

Maxim, Sir Hiram, quoted, 89.
Militarism, in France, 76-78.
Militarism in Germany, 8, 27, 60,

62.
Monroe Doctrine, 94.
Morel, E. D., quoted, 51, 52.
Morocco, 50-52, 64.
Munitions of War, American trade

in, 41, 83-86.

Napoleon, 71.

Naval Power, British, 63.

Neutrality, of America, 83-85, 95,

96-101.
Neutrality of Belgium, 27-33, 45-49,

109.
Non-combatant mind, degradation

of, 13, 35, 111.
Peace, America's interest in, 8,

87-96, 105, 111.
People's war, not a, 75, 90.
Preparedness, American, 94.
Preparedness, of Allies, 39, 108.
Preparedness, of Germany, 24, 38,

39, 108.
Pro-.Mly parWsans in the United

States, 96-104, 106-108.

Recruiting campaign, 14, 29, 34.
Revanche, 54, 74.

INDEX

Russia, true nature of, 23, 24,

SS-S7, 72, 73.
Russian Orange Book, quoted, 68.

Saturday Review (British), 61.
Sazonof, 68.

Scott, Sir Walter, quoted, 71.
Secret diplomacy, 29, 45, 50, S3.
Servia, relation to Austria, 26.
Shaw, G. Bernard, quoted, 28, 83,

91.
Spain, 50.
Stowell, Professor Ellery C,

quoted, 107.
Submarine controversy, 98-100.

Three Year Law, in France, 76,
108.

Tolstoy, 23, 56.
Treitschke, 37, 61, 107.

Usher, Roland G., quoted, 30.

Viviani, 55, 68, 69.

Von Schoen, Ambassador, 69.

War, causes of the, 24, 25, 53, 61,

62, 90, 105, 107, 110.
Wells, H. G., quoted, 88.
Westphalia, 31.

Wilson, President, 82, 86, 95, 96.
Wister, Owen, quoted, 38.
Wolseley, General Garnet, quoted,

89.

Zangwill, Israel, quoted, 94.

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